Shopify Subscriptions Guide: How to Set Up Recurring Orders the Right Way

If you sell coffee, pet food, supplements, skincare or cleaning products, many of your customers buy the same thing again and again. Subscriptions let them set that up once, and let you plan stock around orders you can see coming.

Subscriptions also add new ways for things to go wrong: a card that fails, a customer who cannot find the cancel option, a renewal that charges the wrong shipping. This guide covers how subscriptions work on Shopify and the decisions to make before your first customer signs up.

How subscriptions work on Shopify

Shopify subscriptions are set up with an app. Shopify has its own, Shopify Subscriptions, which is listed as free on the Shopify App Store, and there are other subscription apps on the App Store too.

The app creates selling plans, for example "deliver every 2 weeks, save 10%". The customer chooses a plan on the product page, and Shopify's checkout takes the first payment and saves the payment method for later orders. Each later order is then created and charged automatically on schedule.

Shopify Subscriptions supports weekly, monthly or yearly delivery cycles with discounts, customisable emails including payment reminders, and subscription reporting. Customers manage their subscriptions by signing in to their customer account.

What you need before you start

Two things must be in place before subscriptions can work on your store.

A payment provider that supports subscriptions

Shopify's help centre lists Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net and Adyen, and Stripe for some merchants. Customers can also pay with accelerated checkouts such as Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal. Local payment methods such as Klarna, iDEAL and Sofort cannot be used for subscriptions, so if many of your customers pay that way, plan for it.

A theme that shows subscription options

The customer has to see and choose a plan on the product page. Current Online Store 2.0 themes do this. Among older themes, Shopify lists Debut 15.0 or later and Brooklyn 17.0 or later. If your theme is older or heavily customised, check a product page before you launch.

Decisions to make before launch

The app handles the mechanics. These choices are yours, and they are easier to make before customers depend on them:

• Which products and which delivery frequencies to offer. Start with a few and add more once you see what people choose.
• Whether to give a subscription discount, and how big it should be.
• What customers can do themselves: skip, pause, cancel, and update their card and address. Self-service means fewer support emails.
• How shipping is charged on each delivery.
• How subscription orders reach your stock and fulfilment, so a renewal does not surprise your warehouse.

Failed payments, skips and cancellations

Cards expire and payments fail. Check your subscription app's settings for payment retries and reminder emails, and decide at what point a subscription should stop. Write that rule down so your support team gives customers the same answer every time.

Make skipping and cancelling easy to find. On Shopify, customers can skip, resume or cancel from their customer account, and you can let them pause. A hidden or difficult cancel option leads to chargebacks and complaints, and in some countries it may break consumer rules. Get advice for your own market.

Test a renewal before you go live

The first order is the easy part. Renewals are where problems hide, because they happen days or weeks later without anyone watching. Before launch, on a test store:

1. Place a test subscription on a product with a discount.
2. Trigger or wait for a renewal.
3. Check the renewal order: products, price, discount and shipping.
4. Check the charge on the saved payment method.
5. Check the email the customer receives.
6. Sign in as the customer and check the account page: skip, cancel, and updating the address and card.

This step is easy to skip, because everything looks fine until the first renewal date. Test it while there are no real customers waiting.

When you need a custom subscription setup

An app covers most stores. Custom work makes sense when your model does not fit a standard selling plan: build-a-box subscriptions where the customer picks the contents, prepaid plans with special rules, or subscriptions that must sync with an ERP for stock and accounting.

In those cases we build a custom app around your rules through our Shopify app development service, so the store does exactly what your business needs.

How Kevion can help

Kevion Technologies is a senior software engineering team in Ahmedabad, India, founded by Yash Patel. We build custom Shopify apps, checkout extensions and Shopify Functions, and we build and maintain Shopify and Shopify Plus stores, including Shopify Plus development.

We can set up and test your subscriptions, build a custom setup when an app is not enough, and keep it running through our maintenance and support work. You get a written scope and a fixed price before we start, and you own the code. Tell us about your products through our contact page, and we will reply within one business day.