Creating Subscription Plans
Learn how to set up products that customers can subscribe to.
Overview
Subscription products allow customers to receive your products on a recurring basis. This guide will walk you through the process of creating and configuring subscription products. A subscription plan configures for either a single or multiple products under which terms they are subscribable (for example different frequencies and discounts).
Creating a subscription plan
There are two ways to create a purchase option and assign it to product(s):
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Through the Shopify Product Page:
You can add a purchase option directly from the product editor in your Shopify admin. This allows you to quickly set up subscription options for a specific product while editing its details. -
Via the Zubs App "Plans" Section:
Alternatively, you can open the Zubs app within your Shopify admin and navigate to the "Plans" section. Here, you'll find a full-page form that lets you create or edit selling plans. This method is ideal if you want more control or need to manage multiple products and plans at once.
Both methods will allow you to assign subscription plans to one or more products, depending on your needs.
Step-by-Step Process
1. Open the subscription plan form
- Either by opening a specific product in the Products section of the Shopify admin, or navigating to the Zubs app → Plans section.
2. Configure your subscription plan
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Enter an internal plan title that will only be visible to you.
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Enter a purchase option title that will be visible on the storefront, within the subscription widget.
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Products: Select one or multiple products and product variants to which the configuration should be assigned. You can change this at any time.
Important: It is recommended to always create a variant for each product, even if you only have a single variant for your product.
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Discount and delivery: This section gives you extensive configuration options for your subscription plan
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Offer discount: Whether you want customers to receive a discount on the base price of the product when they are subscribing
- Percentage off = For each interval, you can configure the percentage value that will be deducted from the base price of the product
- Amount off = You can specify an absolute amount that will be deducted as a discount from the base price of the product
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Offer prepaid billing: This lets you set up a subscription for which customers pay for their subscription for several intervals upfront (for example paying 6 months upfront and receiving monthly deliveries).
- You configure the "Prepaid billing cycles" for every "Delivery frequency", such as "Delivery frequency = 1 month" (monthly delivery) and "Prepaid billing cycles = 6" (paying for the cycle every 6 months upfront)
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Set anchor dates: If you want subscription processing to be anchored on specific days of week, month or year (such as: always bill on the 1st of a month), you can configure subscription anchoring for each individual delivery frequency.
- Anchor type: Specific weekday, specific day of month or specific day of year
- Customers on an anchored plan can't reschedule from the customer portal, because the anchor fixes the billing day. Skipping and Ship Now still work.
- Send first checkout order: What happens to the checkout order itself.
- Immediately: the order ships as soon as it's placed.
- Matching the first anchored date: the order ships on the next anchor date instead.
- Cutoff: Moves orders placed shortly before an anchor into the following cycle, so a new subscriber isn't billed again a few days after checkout. An order placed exactly on the cutoff still makes the upcoming cycle — only orders after it move on. The plan editor previews the effect with real dates as you type. There are two ways to set it:
- Lead time in days: how many days before the anchor the cutoff starts. Pick this when the anchor is early in the month — a fixed day can't express "two days before the 2nd", because that day lands in the previous month and is the 31st, 30th or 28th depending on which month it is. Only a lead time gets that right all year.
- Fixed cutoff day: a calendar day — a weekday for weekly anchors, a day of the month for monthly ones. Pick this when you want the same deadline every month, like "order by the 3rd".
The cutoff and Send first checkout order work together. On its own, Send first checkout order does exactly what it says. For an order that falls inside the cutoff, the cutoff pushes both the shipment and the first renewal one anchor further out:
Order Placed Send First Checkout Order Checkout Order Ships First Renewal Outside the cutoff Immediately On the order date Next anchor Outside the cutoff Matching the first anchored date Next anchor The anchor after that Inside the cutoff Immediately Next anchor The anchor after that Inside the cutoff Matching the first anchored date The anchor after the next one The one after that This is why Immediately doesn't always ship immediately: for the days the cutoff catches, it ships on the anchor date instead. With an anchor on the 2nd and a two-day lead time, only orders placed on the 1st fall inside the cutoff — such an order ships on the 2nd and renews on the 2nd of the following month. Without the cutoff it would ship on the 1st and be charged again the very next day.
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Minimum cycles: Require a minimum number of orders before a subscription can end. Turn on Minimum cycles and enter the minimum for each delivery frequency. See Minimum Cycles for how cancellations work on such a plan.
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Introductory discount: Offer an extra one-time discount on the first orders of a new subscription, on top of any regular subscription discount.
- Discount: Set the discount percentage and how many recurring orders it applies to (the checkout order isn't counted).
- Who gets the discount: By default the introductory discount applies to all customers. Add a condition to restrict it to a Shopify customer segment: choose whether the customer is or is not a member of the segment — for example, to exclude customers who have subscribed before. You'll find and create segments in Shopify under Customers → Segments.
3. Verify setup
To verify whether the configuration of your subscription plan is as desired, you can navigate to an associated product on the storefront and take a look at the subscription widget.
For the best customer experience, we recommend that you avoid adding or removing products or variants from a subscription plan after it is active in your store. Only remove a product from a subscription plan if there are no active subscriptions linked to it.
If you update a discount in a subscription plan, the new discount will apply only to new subscriptions created after the change. Existing subscriptions will keep their original discount rates.
Minimum Cycles
With Minimum cycles set, a subscription has to reach that number of orders before a cancellation takes effect. Every order the subscription places counts toward the minimum. Skipped orders create no order, so they don't count — skipping pushes the end of the minimum further out.
When the Customer Cancels
A customer who cancels in the customer portal before the minimum is reached sees how many more orders are needed and, where it can be calculated, the earliest date the cancellation takes effect. Confirming schedules the cancellation instead of ending the subscription right away:
- The subscription keeps billing and shipping as usual and is marked Cancellation Scheduled in the customer portal.
- When the last required order is placed, Zubs cancels the subscription automatically.
- Until then, the customer can withdraw the cancellation with Keep Subscription.
Prepaid subscriptions cancelled from the customer portal end immediately, whatever the minimum.
When You Cancel
Cancelling a subscription that hasn't reached its minimum from the subscription detail page in the merchant portal schedules the cancellation the same way. The page shows a banner with the minimum, and once scheduled, a Cancellation Scheduled banner with the orders still to go. Revoke Cancellation removes a scheduled cancellation.
To end the subscription straight away, tick Force immediate cancellation (bypass minimum cycles) in the cancel dialog. Bulk cancellation from the subscriptions list always cancels immediately.
Notifications
No email goes out when a cancellation is scheduled. The Subscription Cancelled email is sent when the subscription actually ends, after the last required order.
Subscriptions keep the minimum their plan had when they were created. Changing Minimum cycles on a plan applies to new subscriptions.