Product Subscriptions

Overview

Product subscriptions let your customers receive a product on a schedule, for example every 2 weeks or every 4 weeks, at a price you set. Each delivery is a real order in your dashboard, charged to the customer's saved card and fulfilled like any other order. This is the storefront "Subscribe & Save" option.

Not to be confused with your own DashForDevs plan (the subscription you pay us for), which lives under Billing & Subscriptions.

Before You Start

• Authorize.net must be your active payment processor. Renewals charge a card saved with Authorize.net, so no other processor can renew a product subscription today.
• Untick Card Code "Required" in the classic Authorize.net interface (Account, Settings, Payment Form, Form Fields). Saved-card charges carry no card code, so while it is required every renewal is declined with error 33: Card Code is required. The newer Authorize.net interface can show the box unticked while the classic setting is still ticked, so check the classic one. See Authorize.net.
• Guest subscribers (optional). If shoppers should be able to subscribe without signing in first, the organization's checkout_skip_otp setting must be on. A guest checkout is matched to a customer account by email, and the saved card is stored on that account.

Create A Subscription Offering

1. Go to Dashboard, Inventory, Subscriptions and choose New.
2. Pick the product.
3. Tick the sizes you want to offer on subscription.
4. Add the frequencies (columns) you want, for example every 2 weeks and every 4 weeks.
5. Fill the price grid: one cell per size and frequency, holding the price per delivery. A blank cell is not offered. Different frequencies of the same size can carry different prices.
6. Save. Nothing reaches the storefront until you save, and saving sends the whole grid.

The same grid appears on the offering's own page and on the product's Subscriptions tab. Each cell becomes a plan: one size, one interval, one price per delivery. Storefronts show the saving against the one-time price as a percentage, for example "Subscribe & Save 10–15%" on a product card. Through the API a cell can also be priced as a discount_percent off the size price instead of a fixed price.

For flavored products, a color (custom_fields.color, a hex value) and an icon (custom_fields.icon, an image URL) on each attribute option let a storefront draw colored flavor tiles.

Changing, Deactivating And Deleting

• Changing the grid. A cell removed from the grid is deleted if nobody ever subscribed to it, and deactivated if somebody did (their charges and orders still point at it). The grid labels cells that have subscribers.
• Deactivating an offering takes it off the storefront and cancels every active or paused subscription on it. Each subscriber is emailed that the store has cancelled their subscription, and no further charges are made. These cancellations are final: reactivating does not restart them.
• Reactivating an offering never restarts or charges anyone. Each customer whose subscription was cancelled by the deactivation is emailed once, with a link to their subscription page where they can choose to subscribe again.
• Deleting is only possible when nobody has ever subscribed. Once anyone has, deactivate instead: that keeps the billing history.

Next Steps

• Subscription Checkout And Renewals: how orders and charges happen
• Subscription Self-Service And Emails: what customers can do and what they are sent
• Subscriptions In Your Dashboard: orders, reporting and affiliates
• Subscription Cart Lines: building the storefront with the SDK