Subscriptions
Selling something billed on a cycle, the five states a subscription moves through, failed payments, and what a customer can change.
Sales, Subscriptions. A subscription is a product billed repeatedly rather than once: a membership, a book club, a monthly box.
Subscriptions need a higher plan
If Subscriptions is missing from your Sales menu, that is why. See What Your Plan Includes.
Setting Up a Subscription Product
On the product, set type to Subscription. A Subscription tab appears.
Billing interval is daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, with a count: every 1 month, every 3 months, every 2 weeks.
Free trial days gives a period before the first charge. The subscription exists and is marked trialing during it.
Setup fee is charged once at the start, in addition to the first cycle.
A subscription product can have variants, which is how tiers work: a monthly and an annual version of the same membership, or bronze, silver and gold at different prices.
The Five States
| State | Means |
|---|---|
| Trialing | In a free trial, not yet charged |
| Active | Billing normally |
| Past due | A payment failed and it is being retried |
| Paused | Billing suspended, nothing being charged |
| Cancelled | Ended, no further charges |
| Expired | Reached its end date |
A subscription moves between these on its own as payments succeed or fail, and you can move one by hand from the subscription itself.
How Billing Happens
The shop charges the stored payment method on each cycle date, without the customer doing anything.
The card is stored with the processor, not in the shop
Nobody at your shop or on the platform can see a card number. That also means a card that expires needs replacing by the customer, which they do from their account. A subscription that suddenly fails is far more often an expired card than a refusal.
Each successful cycle creates a real order, which appears in your order list and counts towards revenue like any other.
When a Payment Fails
The subscription goes past due and is retried. The customer is emailed so they can fix the card.
If retries are exhausted it stops. Decide in advance what you want to happen at that point, because a membership that quietly stops working without anybody telling the member produces a complaint rather than a renewal.
The Subscription Report shows active subscriptions, what they are worth per cycle, and what has lapsed. The number to watch is not the total but the direction: more lapsing than starting is a trend that takes months to show up in revenue.
Pausing Rather Than Cancelling
Pausing suspends billing and keeps the subscription. That is the right answer for a customer going away for two months, and it saves them resubscribing, which many of them will not do.
Cancelling ends it. A cancelled subscription is not resumed, a new one is started.
What the Customer Can Do Themselves
From their account they can see the subscription, update the card, and cancel. Whether they can pause or change tier depends on how you have set it up.
Anything they cannot do themselves, they will email you about, so it is worth knowing which is which before you launch.
Changing a Price
Changing the product price does not change existing subscriptions, because each one carries the price it was taken out at. That is deliberate: silently raising what somebody already pays is the fastest way to lose them.
To move existing subscribers to a new price you have to do it deliberately, and you should tell them first.
Before You Sell One
Take a subscription out yourself, with a real card, on a short interval if you can. Let it bill at least twice. That is the only way to see the renewal email, the renewal order, and what happens in the account screen, which is where most of the customer's experience actually lives.