Wordpress Subscriptions/Recurring Payments

Question

I'm about to create a Monthly Subscription Box E-Commerce website with Wordpress and i'm having trouble deciding which platforms/tools I should use to implement this.

There are so many options out there and each have questions about integration, level of support, reliability, pricing, some are only available in the US and i'm based in the UK etc.

1. Ecommerce platform - Should I use Woocommerce or is there a better alternative?
2. Manage Subscriptions - Woocommerce has an (expensive) extention for Subscriptions, again should I use this or is there a better, more developed (free) alternative?
3. Payment Gateways - PayPal, Stripe, Authorise.net. How easy are they to Integrate with Wordpress/commerce platform? etc.

As you can see there a lot of options and possible combinations which makes this quite confusing.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

1. Woocommerce is the best free plug & play solution you can get in my expercience.
2. There are different and cheaper extensions, the question is rather what do you want to do with it? From there you can do your search on Google.
3. Easiest solution is sticking to the Core Payment Options http://docs.woothemes.com/documentation/plugins/woocommerce/getting-started/sell-products/core-payment-options/. Payment gateways are always a hassle to setup.

Tip: Keep it easy and go with the bare minimum. If a feature/function is really needed your customers will let you know in one way or an other.