If you're running a winery or drinks business and selling online, WooCommerce is probably already on your radar, or already on your website. It powers a huge proportion of small-business e-commerce in the UK and Europe, it's free to install, and it sits neatly on top of WordPress, which many producers already use for their website.
The problem, as with Shopify, comes the moment subscriptions enter the picture.
What WooCommerce does well
WooCommerce is genuinely flexible. Because it's open source and built on WordPress, you can customise almost anything: your product pages, your checkout, your customer accounts. If you have a developer, you can make it do a lot.
It's also free at the base level, which makes it appealing for producers who are just starting to sell online and don't want to commit to a monthly platform fee.
And for straightforward e-commerce, selling cases of wine, processing one-off orders, managing stock, WooCommerce does the job.
Why WooCommerce struggles with drinks subscriptions
WooCommerce's subscription capabilities come entirely from plugins. The most commonly used is WooCommerce Subscriptions (from WooThemes, around £179/year), which handles simple recurring payments reasonably well.
But wine clubs and drinks subscriptions are rarely simple. The moment you need:
- Variable contents: a different selection each shipment, curated by the producer rather than chosen by the customer
- Member tiers: different packages for different levels of membership
- Allocation logic: limited releases where members get priority access before the general shop
- Integrated events: harvest tastings, cellar door evenings, member dinners connected to club membership
- Flexible member self-service: pausing, skipping, swapping, updating addresses without contacting you
...you're either writing custom code, stacking multiple plugins on top of each other, or doing things manually.
“The big Achilles heel of the big 'shopping' providers like Shopify and WooCommerce is that they don't really understand recurring subscription shopping. If you subscribe to a 'discovery case' that varies every shipment, these services do not cope at all well.”
The real cost of WooCommerce for wine clubs
WooCommerce advertises itself as free, but the total cost of running a wine club on it is rarely free. A realistic setup involves:
- WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin: around £179/year
- A hosting plan capable of running WordPress reliably: from £100–300/year
- WooCommerce Memberships (if you want proper tier management): around £179/year
- Developer time for setup, customisation, and ongoing maintenance, typically several days per year at minimum
- Separate tools for CRM, email marketing, and event management
More importantly: every time WordPress or WooCommerce releases an update, there's a risk that a plugin breaks. Managing a stack of interdependent plugins on a live e-commerce site is ongoing maintenance work. For a producer whose core business is making wine, not managing software, this becomes a real operational burden.
The switching cost that catches people out
Many English wineries start with WooCommerce because they already have a WordPress website. It feels like the path of least resistance.
The hidden cost is what happens when the wine club grows and the limitations become real. Migrating customer data, subscription records, and order history from WooCommerce to a dedicated platform is painful. The earlier you move to a purpose-built platform, the less migration work you face later.
What Marzipan does differently
Marzipan is built specifically for subscription commerce in the drinks and food industry. Rather than starting from a generic e-commerce model and adding subscription capability through plugins, subscriptions are the foundation.
Everything in one place. Commerce, subscriptions, CRM, events, and member management are all part of the same platform. No plugins to maintain, no data fragmented across different tools.
Variable subscription contents work natively. Different wines each quarter, different tiers receiving different allocations, winemaker-curated shipments, all handled without custom development.
Events are integrated. Harvest tastings, cellar door evenings, member dinners, connected to your membership data and managed from the same dashboard.
EU hosted and GDPR compliant. Marzipan is built in the UK and hosted on EU-based servers. No reliance on US data hosting, no exposure to EU-US data transfer uncertainty.
No plugin maintenance. One platform, kept up to date, without the risk of a WordPress update breaking your checkout.
When WooCommerce makes sense
WooCommerce is still a reasonable choice if:
- You have a WordPress website and want to add basic e-commerce without a separate platform
- You're selling wine primarily as one-off purchases with no subscription element
- You have a developer who can manage the ongoing maintenance
- Your wine club is very simple: same wines, same price, same customers, no variation
When Marzipan makes sense
Marzipan is likely the better fit if:
- Your wine club is central to your DTC business, not an afterthought
- Your shipments vary, curated by you, different each cycle
- You want events and memberships managed in the same system as your shop and subscriptions
- You're tired of managing plugins and want one platform that just works
- You're selling into the UK or EU and want GDPR-compliant, EU-hosted infrastructure
The bottom line
WooCommerce works well for straightforward e-commerce. For wine clubs and drinks subscriptions with any real complexity, the plugin stack required to make it work becomes expensive, fragile, and time-consuming to maintain.
We built Marzipan for exactly the use case WooCommerce can't handle well: subscription commerce where the contents vary, the members have different tiers, and events are part of the membership experience. Pricing starts at £199/month with no transaction fees on order value.
If subscriptions are at the heart of how you sell direct to your customers, it's worth seeing Marzipan in practice.
Related
For a broader look at choosing a platform, read our guide to wine club software for wineries. Or compare Marzipan vs Shopify.
