Documentation
Setting up Renew Forge
Everything lives under Renew Forge in the WordPress admin menu. The free plugin adds Compliance check, Journal and Settings; Renew Forge Pro adds Reminders, Cooling-off & checkout, SMS, Refunds, Evidence export and Licence.
Install
- WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions must be active.
- Install Renew Forge (the free plugin's zip) through Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin and activate it. Open Renew Forge → Compliance check: it lists what your store already does and what to change.
- For Pro, upload the Renew Forge Pro zip from your Avakode account, activate it and enter your licence key under Renew Forge → Licence.
The free plugin
Settings switch the one-click cancel button on or off, choose whether it replaces the WooCommerce Subscriptions Cancel link (one cancel path is recommended), set the button label and the subscription summary text. The cancellation confirmation email is a normal WooCommerce email under WooCommerce → Settings → Emails.
The Journal records every cancellation — who, when, from which screen, and whether the confirmation went out — and exports to CSV exactly as stored.
Licence
Enter the key from your Avakode account. The add-on checks it with our licence server at activation, once a day and when you release the site; an unreachable server switches nothing off. Deactivating or deleting the add-on releases the site from the licence.
While the licence is active, new versions of the add-on appear under Dashboard → Updates and on the Plugins screen like any other plugin. Each package is checked against the published release and Avakode's signature before WordPress installs it, and refused if it does not match.
Renewal reminders
Renew Forge → Reminders. Off until you tick Send reminders.
| Setting | Default | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Days before the payment | 7 | Not set by the Act (s. 259(4) asks for a "reasonable" period). State the same period in your terms. |
| Earlier reminder, days before | 30 | For renewals twelve months or more apart (s. 259(6)–(8)). The Act asks only that it comes before the regular reminder, at a reasonable time: when this date has already passed (a free trial shorter than it), it goes at once and the regular reminder follows. |
| Remind at least every (months) | 6 | The Act as passed. A higher number means fewer reminders than the Act requires, and the screen says so. |
| Earlier reminder for gaps of (months) | 12 | The Act as passed. |
| Trial or discount ending | on | The first payment after a free trial or a coupon limited to a number of payments (s. 258(3)(a)). |
| Every renewal | off | Remind before every renewal — also covers the end of discounts the plugin cannot see. |
| Minimum term | off | Tick only if fixed-length subscriptions cannot be ended early. Payments inside the term cannot be avoided by cancelling, so they are not renewal payments and need no reminder; the reminder before the first payment after a free trial says what the term then costs, and reminders state every payment left as the minimum. The checkout names the term and its end date. The cancel button records the request and ends the subscription at the end of the term; the payments until then remain due. |
Reminders are planned when WooCommerce Subscriptions changes a subscription and in a daily run; each one is planned once per payment, retried after 15 minutes, 2 hours and 8 hours if the email fails, and logged with its result. The emails are Renewal reminder and Trial ending reminder under WooCommerce → Settings → Emails. If WooCommerce Subscriptions also sends its own customer reminders, switch one of them off.
Cooling-off cancellations and refunds
Renew Forge → Cooling-off & checkout. Tick Cancel and refund to show the button in My account while a cooling-off period is open: 14 days from the day after the contract (for goods, after the first delivery), and 14 days after a renewal that follows a free trial or discount, or that comes twelve months or more before the next payment.
| Setting | Default | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Cooling-off period (days) | 14 | The Act as passed (s. 265). |
| Renewal period after gaps of (months) | 12 | The Act as passed (s. 265(3)(b)). |
| Refund (services, digital content) | By time | The unused share of each payment, to the second, rounded up to the penny — or the whole payment. |
| Refund for goods | Whole payment when the goods come back | A task for you on the Refunds screen; or "by time", straight away. |
| Goods received (days after Completed) | 0 | WooCommerce does not record delivery: the period for goods runs from the Completed date plus these days. Mark orders Completed when the customer has received everything. |
| Never Completed: period ends after (days) | 30 | So a period is never open-ended. |
| Refunds by hand due within (days) | 14 | The due date on the task and in the customer's email. |
| How to return goods | — | Your instructions, shown in the cooling-off notice and the confirmation. |
When a customer presses Cancel and refund, the subscription ends at once and only that subscription's share of each payment in the period is refunded — never other subscriptions or one-off products from the same order. The refund goes through the payment gateway when it supports refunds. Otherwise — or when the gateway answers with an error, or for goods — the refund appears under Renew Forge → Refunds with what to do and by when, and you are emailed. After a gateway error, check your payment provider first: the refund may have gone through. Mark it as refunded when done; that records it on the order and in the journal.
The customer receives the end-of-contract confirmation (free plugin), the refund email (Pro) and WooCommerce's own "Refunded order" email for each gateway refund. At the start of each renewal cooling-off period Pro sends the Cooling-off notice (s. 266).
Subscription terms at checkout
Tick Checkout acknowledgement on the same screen. When the cart holds a new subscription, the checkout shows its key terms — price and how often (for the quantity and coupons in the cart), any sign-up fee, trial or fixed payment day and the first payment date, renewal or length, the least the customer will pay, how to cancel, your reminder period and the cooling-off right — with a tick box: "I understand that this is a subscription and that I will pay … until I cancel".
- Classic checkout: right above the order button.
- Checkout block: in the payment step, before the terms and the Place order button; it appears without editing the page.
The order is refused on the server if the box is not ticked. The text shown, its version and hash, and the time of the tick are saved on the order and in the journal. Renewals paid through the cart (manual or early renewal) ask nothing: they are not new contracts.
SMS reminders
Renew Forge → SMS, in the Store + SMS and Agency plans. Choose Twilio or Vonage and enter your own account's credentials; nothing is sent until you do. Requests go to api.twilio.com or rest.nexmo.com with the customer's billing phone number, the message and your credentials. The secret is stored only encrypted: first add this line to wp-config.php with any long random string:
define( 'RNWF_PRO_SECRET_KEY', '…long random string…' );
Tick which reminders also go by SMS. Each SMS is a row in the reminder log with the provider's message id or its error.
Evidence export and retention
Renew Forge → Evidence export downloads the journal or the reminder log for up to 366 days at a time, as CSV or JSON, exactly as stored. On the same screen, Keep records for (years) (default 6, the time limit for contract claims in England and Wales; 0 = never delete) sets how long evidence is kept; older records are deleted daily and each deletion is itself recorded. Records of a subscription with an unfinished refund or a recent cooling-off period are kept whatever their age.