Subscription Features Settings
The Subscription Features settings page lets you control which self-service actions are available to customers in the portal, as well as other subscription-related configuration like product filtering, billing cycle locks, and pickup locations.
The Zubs Mobile App surfaces the same customer self-serve controls in a native mobile experience.
Settings overview
| Setting | Type |
|---|---|
| 1. Reschedule Next Order | Customer & merchant portal toggle |
| 2. Skip Orders | Customer portal toggle |
| 3. Redeem Discount | Customer portal toggle |
| 4. Edit One-Time Products | Customer portal toggle |
| Add Paid Extras | Customer portal toggle (build-a-box) |
| 5. Edit Subscription Products | Customer portal toggle |
| 6. Edit Future Cycles | Customer portal toggle |
| 7. Change Delivery Frequency | Customer portal toggle |
| 8. Ship Now | Customer portal toggle |
| 9. Cancel Subscription | Customer portal toggle |
| 10. Subscription Products Collection | Product filtering |
| 11. Default Item Fill | Automation |
| 12. Billing Cycle Edit Lock | Operational control |
| 13. Upcoming Orders List | Portal display |
| 14. Product Tag Display | Portal display |
| 15. Pickup Locations | Portal feature |
| 16. Turn Orders into Subscriptions | Customer account upsell |
| Per-plan feature overrides | Per-plan configuration |
1. Reschedule Next Order
Allows customers to change the date of their next billing cycle only.
This one covers your own team too: with it off, the Reschedule action and the per-cycle Reschedule buttons disappear from the subscription detail page in the merchant portal, so a billing date can't be moved from the admin either. A per-plan override applies on both sides — if a plan overrides this setting, subscriptions on that plan follow the override in the customer portal and in the merchant portal.
Anchored plans: customers on a plan with anchor dates never see Reschedule in the customer portal, whatever this setting says. An anchored subscription bills on a fixed day, so there's no other date to move it to. Your team can still reschedule it from the merchant portal.
When to enable:
- ✅ Customers have predictable schedule changes (vacation, travel, etc.)
- ✅ Your fulfillment can handle variable schedules
When to disable:
- ❌ You have limited shipping windows or fixed logistics schedules
Note: Only the next order is moved; future orders return to the regular schedule afterwards.
2. Skip Orders
Allows customers to skip one or more upcoming orders without canceling.
When to enable:
- ✅ Consumable products where customers might have excess inventory
- ✅ Customer flexibility is a competitive advantage
When to disable:
- ❌ Services where continuity is critical
- ❌ You want to encourage commitment
3. Redeem Discount
Allows customers to apply Shopify discount codes to their subscription from the portal.
When to enable:
- ✅ You run promotions or have a loyalty/referral program
- ✅ You use discount codes as retention offers during cancellation
When to disable:
- ❌ Subscription pricing is already discounted and no stacking is intended
- ❌ Discount abuse is a concern
4. Edit One-Time Products
Allows customers to add products to a single upcoming order without adding them to the recurring subscription.
What customers see in the picker: the products they can add, plus the products already on that order — including the subscription's own recurring product. Customers can change its quantity for that one order but can't remove or swap it, since an order without it would ship and bill as though they had only ever subscribed to the add-ons. Either way the recurring subscription itself is unchanged — edits here apply to the single order.
On a build-a-box subscription the shell product stays hidden from this picker instead, because it stands for the box rather than something in it.
Add Paid Extras
On a build-a-box subscription with a free item limit, this controls whether customers can go past the free items their box includes when they edit an upcoming order. It's on by default.
- On: customers can pick more items than the box includes. The extra items are added as paid items, and the picker shows how many of them are paid.
- Off: customers can pick up to the free item limit and no more. The + buttons stop at the limit. When an order holds more items than the limit, the customer removes the extra items before they can save a change to that order.
Only the items picked for the box count toward the limit. The shell product doesn't count. Other products on the subscription itself count only above their subscribed quantity. Free gifts added by a Sequential Flow count toward the limit.
You can set this per plan with a per-plan override.
When to turn off:
- ❌ Your box price covers a fixed number of items and you don't sell extras
When to keep on:
- ✅ Customers can top up their box with paid items
How a one-order quantity interacts with the recurring one: a quantity set for a single order sticks through pausing, rescheduling and other edits to the subscription. It's replaced only when the customer changes that product's recurring quantity under Edit Subscription Products — the newer choice wins, so every one-order quantity they'd set is dropped and upcoming orders follow the recurring number. Products they'd added to single orders stay. A quantity you change from the merchant portal works the other way round: an order the customer has already adjusted keeps their number, and yours applies to the rest.
When to enable:
- ✅ You offer complementary products customers might want occasionally
When to disable:
- ❌ Variable order contents complicate your fulfillment
Use cases: Add a travel mug to a coffee order, a shaker bottle to a protein subscription, or a sample of a new product.
5. Edit Subscription Products
Allows customers to add, remove, or change quantities of their recurring subscription products.
When to enable:
- ✅ You offer multiple products and want customers to adjust over time
When to disable:
- ❌ Subscription contents were set through a consultation or require review
- ❌ You only offer one product
Product filtering: Use Subscription Products Collection to control which products are available to add.
6. Edit Future Cycles
Allows customers to customize the contents of specific upcoming billing cycles, beyond just the next order.
When to enable:
- ✅ You offer product variety and want customers to plan ahead
- ✅ Your fulfillment can handle order-specific customizations per cycle
When to disable:
- ❌ You prefer customers make changes closer to each billing date
- ❌ Uniform order processing is required
7. Change Delivery Frequency
Allows customers to change how often they receive their subscription orders.
When to enable:
- ✅ You offer multiple frequency options
- ✅ Customer usage rates vary and frequency flexibility reduces cancellations
When to disable:
- ❌ You only offer one frequency or logistics are optimized for a fixed interval
8. Ship Now
Allows customers to immediately bill and fulfill their next order, regardless of the scheduled billing date.
When to enable:
- ✅ Customers might run out of product early and need on-demand replenishment
When to disable:
- ❌ You cannot process orders outside of fixed fulfillment windows
Note: Ship Now moves only the current order: it's billed and fulfilled right away. Later orders stay on their scheduled dates, so the wait until the following order gets longer.
When it can't run: Ship Now is declined — with a message explaining why — if the next order has already been billed, if it's currently skipped (unskip it first), or if the subscription has no upcoming order to bring forward, as on a paused or cancelled subscription.
9. Cancel Subscription
⚠️ Always enabled — cannot be disabled. Customers can always cancel from the customer portal without contacting support.
On a plan with Minimum cycles, a cancellation made before the subscription has reached that number of orders is scheduled rather than immediate: it takes effect after the last required order.
Configuration: Cancellation reasons, retention offers, and the cancellation flow are configured in Settings → General Settings.
10. Subscription Products Collection
Filters which products customers can add to their subscriptions, based on one or more Shopify collections.
When to enable:
- ✅ You have a large catalog and only some products are subscription-eligible
When to disable:
- ❌ All your products are available for subscription
How to set up:
- Create a collection in Shopify (e.g., "Subscription Products") and add eligible products
- Enable this setting, then click Browse collections and pick the collection(s) to include
- Customers will only see products from the selected collections when editing their subscription
Each selling plan can offer its own collections instead, and can switch filtering on for itself even when it is off here — see Per-plan feature overrides.
Which products are offered. Products are offered only when they are active, published to your Online Store sales channel, and available in your customer's market. Variants you hide from the Online Store aren't offered. A variant that's out of stock stays in the picker, shown as unavailable. The Available Products preview lists the products and variants that aren't active or published to your Online Store under Not offered to customers, with the reason.
Restrict a collection to specific billing date ranges
By default, a collection's products are available whatever the billing date. You can restrict a collection to specific periods with an availability schedule: open the collection in Shopify admin and click More actions → Availability schedule (see Configure availability schedules). Products in that collection then only appear when the billing date of the order being edited falls within one of its periods.
Both dates are part of a period. A billing date is judged on your store's own calendar day, in the time zone set in Shopify.
For a rotating menu, make the periods follow each other without gaps or overlaps, for example the first to the last day of each month. A billing date outside every period gets no products from that collection.
Always (no restriction) offers the collection for every billing date. Never makes it unavailable for every billing date.
When you select several collections, the customer is offered the products of every collection that applies to that billing date, together as one list. Several collections can cover the same period. A collection with no schedule applies to every date, so its products sit alongside those of any scheduled collection. A product that belongs to more than one of them is shown once.
11. Default Item Fill
Places a product from your collections into a subscription order when the customer hasn't picked one themselves.
Customers with a free item in their box are meant to choose what goes in it, and many never open the portal. A few days before the order is charged, this fills the empty slots from exactly the collections that customer would have been offered for that order, so the box ships complete.
What it requires. Two things, and nothing is placed without both:
- A build-a-box subscription that gives away free items. The shell product needs the
zubs-main-producttag, and its variant needscustom.free_subscription_products_limitset to a whole number above zero. That number is the allowance the fill tops up to. A box set up with only a minimum order threshold (custom.minimum_order_amount_for_cycle) and no free-item limit is left alone — the fill places free items, so there has to be a free allowance to place them into. - Subscription Products Collection switched on, with at least one collection. The fill draws from the same list the customer's own picker offers: only products that are active, published to your Online Store sales channel, and available in the customer's market. Variants you hide from the Online Store aren't placed.
How to enable:
- Turn the setting on
- Pick rule — First available places products in your collections' order, moving on to the next one when a product's stock is used up; Random spreads the items evenly, so each product gets about the same number
- Default items per cycle — how many to place when the slots are empty
- Fill window (days before billing) — how many days before the charge the fill runs
Choosing the window. It has to be earlier than the Billing Cycle Edit Lock, including the edit lock of any plan that runs the fill, so the customer can still change what was placed. Without an edit lock, the window only has to be at least one day. A save that would put the window at or inside an edit lock is refused, and the message names the lock it hit. Reminders sent before the item is placed show the order without it, so set the window above your earliest reminder if every reminder should show the item.
What the customer sees. The item appears in their order like any other, and they can swap or remove it until the edit lock closes. The subscription timeline records it as added automatically.
With Match items to the subscription variant on, the fill only places items matching the customer's box variant.
Stock. A product that tracks inventory and stops selling when it's out of stock is only placed while stock is left for it. The fill counts the items it has already placed on upcoming orders against that stock, so it never places more than you have. Products that don't track inventory, or keep selling when out of stock, have no such limit. A variant that isn't available for sale is skipped.
Orders that are already skipped, already charged, or already hold as many items as the setting allows are left alone.
First order (Shopify Plus)
Also add a default item to the first order extends the fill to checkout: when a new subscriber checks out, checkout adds a free item picked by the same rules — the same collections, pick rule, stock and availability, and the same count, capped by the box's free allowance. Each subscription in the checkout follows its own plan's settings, including any per-plan override.
For the first order, a collection's availability schedule is checked against the day of checkout rather than a billing date.
The option appears once the fill is on, for the store or for at least one plan, and only on Shopify Plus.
How to enable:
- Turn on Also add a default item to the first order and save
- Approve the permission to change cart prices when Shopify asks — the item is priced at zero through it, and the option stays off without it
- In the checkout editor, add the First-order default item block once — it renders nothing, but checkout only adds the item while the block is placed
What the customer sees. The item appears in checkout at a price of zero. If they remove it, checkout adds it again.
12. Billing Cycle Edit Lock
Prevents customers from editing a billing cycle within a set number of days before the billing date.
When to enable:
- ✅ Last-minute changes cause fulfillment or processing issues (e.g., custom or made-to-order products)
Configuration: Turn the lock on and set the number of lock days (minimum 1). A value of 3 means no customer edits are allowed in the 3 days leading up to billing. With the lock off, customers can edit a cycle until it's billed.
Customer impact: Edit controls are hidden for billing cycles that fall within the lock window. Cycles outside the window remain editable.
13. Upcoming Orders List
Controls how far ahead the customer portal's upcoming orders page reaches.
Configuration: Under Limit the list by, pick one of two ways to limit it:
- Number of orders — the page lists at most this many upcoming orders (1–52)
- Period of time — the page lists the orders billing within a period you set, up to one year ahead
By default the page lists up to 12 upcoming orders.
Why a year is the maximum: Skip, Reschedule and Ship Now act on orders within the coming year, so the list stays inside that range — an order shown beyond it couldn't be changed from the portal.
What customers see: In number mode the count is an upper limit; orders hidden because no products are available for them (see Subscription Products Collection) aren't shown, so customers can see fewer. In period mode, a subscription whose next order falls outside the period shows a note that there are no orders in that period, and the next order date stays visible on the card above it.
Where it doesn't apply: The upcoming orders view on a prepaid subscription groups deliveries under each payment and isn't affected by this setting — one payment covers many deliveries, so a period measured against payment dates wouldn't match what that view shows.
14. Product Tag Display
Controls which Shopify product tags are shown next to products in the portal's add-product dialogs.
When to configure:
- ✅ You want to surface specific meaningful tags to customers (e.g., "Organic", "New")
How it works: By default, no tags are shown. Add tags to the allowlist to make them visible next to products in the portal's add-product dialogs.
15. Pickup Locations
Enables a pickup location selector in the customer portal so customers can choose a pickup location for their subscription deliveries.
Shopify's native pickup is tied to your store locations, so the number of pickup points is capped by the location limit of your Shopify plan. This feature works around that limit and supports an unlimited number of custom locations.
For setup instructions, see the Custom Pickup Locations guide.
16. Turn Orders into Subscriptions
Offers customers the option to turn a past one-time order into a subscription, from the orders page and the order status page of their account. On by default.
For where it appears and when it's hidden, see Turn past orders into subscriptions.
Per-plan feature overrides
By default, all subscription feature settings apply globally to every subscription in your store. If you need different behavior for specific selling plans, you can override individual settings on a per-plan basis.
How it works
- Each selling plan can override the customer portal toggles Reschedule Next Order, Skip Orders, Edit One-Time Products, Add Paid Extras, Edit Subscription Products, Edit Future Cycles, Change Delivery Frequency, and Ship Now, as well as the Billing Cycle Edit Lock, the Subscription Products Collection — both whether it applies and which collections it offers — the Default Item Fill, including its pick rule and how many items it places, the Upcoming Orders List, which the plan sets the same way the store does: pick how to limit the list, then fill in that choice's field, and Match Items to the Subscription Variant from Product Settings. The fill window is store-wide and cannot be overridden per plan, and neither can Redeem Discount or pausing.
- Overrides replace the global default only for subscriptions using that specific selling plan
- Settings that are not overridden continue to use the global default
Setting up overrides
- Navigate to Plans and open the selling plan you want to customize
- In the Per-plan feature settings card, click Add override
- Select the setting you want to override from the list (each entry shows the setting name, description, and current global default)
- Set the override value — toggle On/Off for boolean settings, enter a number for the Billing Cycle Edit Lock (0 removes the lock for that plan), pick how to limit the list and fill in its field for the Upcoming Orders List, or click Browse collections for Products Collection: collections
- Save the plan
You can add multiple overrides per plan and remove any override to revert to the global default.
Offering different products per plan
A plan can offer its own collections instead of the global ones. This suits stores running several programs from one catalog — a jewelry box and a skincare box drawing from different ranges.
The setting has two halves, listed in the override picker as a pair:
- Products Collection: filtering — whether the plan restricts products to collections at all
- Products Collection: collections — which collections the plan offers
The two work together. A plan's collections are used only while filtering is On for that plan — its own override if it has one, otherwise the store-wide setting. A list sitting under filtering that is Off is saved and ignored, and the plan shows a "Not applied" note next to it.
On a store with no collections configured, adding either half adds the other, so the plan starts with filtering On and an empty list to fill in. When the store already has a collection list, each half is added on its own and the plan inherits the one it does not override.
You do not have to turn the feature on store-wide first. A plan can switch filtering on for itself while the rest of the store has it off, which is the way to give one plan its own product range without changing anything else.
A setting the plan leaves alone follows the global value, so a plan can use its own collections and inherit every other feature setting.
A plan that overrides its collections has to list at least one, unless it also overrides filtering to Off. While the list is empty the plan won't save — pick a collection, remove the collections override, or set the plan's filtering override to Off, which is how a plan opts out of collection filtering entirely.
Removing one half of the pair can take the other with it. The confirmation dialog names what else is going.
Seeing which plans have overrides
On the Subscription Features settings page, each setting that has at least one plan-level override shows a blue badge next to its name (e.g., "2 overrides"). Click the badge to see which plans override that setting, their override values, and a link to edit each plan directly. The Products Collection card counts a plan once even when it overrides both halves.
Example
A store sells two subscription plans: "Monthly Essentials" and "Premium Weekly Box."
- Global settings: Skip Orders = On, Ship Now = On, Billing Cycle Edit Lock = Off
- Premium Weekly Box overrides: Skip Orders = Off, Billing Cycle Edit Lock = 3 days
Customers on "Monthly Essentials" can skip orders and ship now, with no edit lock. Customers on "Premium Weekly Box" cannot skip orders and must make changes at least 3 days before billing.
Troubleshooting
A feature isn't showing in the customer portal
- Verify the feature is enabled in Settings → Subscription Features
- Confirm the customer's subscription is active (some features don't show on paused or cancelled subscriptions)
- Test in an incognito window to rule out cache issues
Customer can't edit a billing cycle
- Check if Billing Cycle Edit Lock is enabled — the customer may be within the lock window
- Verify Edit Future Cycles is enabled if the customer is trying to edit a non-next cycle
Subscription Products Collection shows no products
- Confirm the selected collection(s) are not empty in Shopify
- Check that the products are active and published to your Online Store sales channel. The Available Products preview lists the ones that aren't, under Not offered to customers
- Check that the collection is set to Manual or that smart collection rules match your subscription products
- If the subscription's plan overrides its collections, check the collections on that plan rather than the global list
- Check that filtering is On for that plan — a plan that overrides only the collections still follows the store-wide setting, and the list is ignored while that is off
The default item fill isn't placing anything
- Confirm the shell product has the
zubs-main-producttag and acustom.free_subscription_products_limitabove zero — a box with only a minimum order threshold has no free slot to fill - Confirm Subscription Products Collection is on and the collections aren't empty
- Check that the products are offered to customers: active, published to your Online Store sales channel, and available in the customer's market. The Available Products preview lists the products and variants that aren't active or published to your Online Store, under Not offered to customers
- If a collection has an availability schedule, check that a period covers the order's billing date
- If the products track inventory, check their stock: a product is only placed while stock is left after the items already placed on upcoming orders
- Check the fill window is earlier than the edit lock, including a plan's own edit lock
- Orders that are skipped, already charged, or already full are left alone
- If the plan overrides its collections, check that plan's list rather than the store-wide one
The first order doesn't get a default item
- Confirm the store is on Shopify Plus
- Check that Also add a default item to the first order is on and the cart-price permission was approved
- Check that the First-order default item block is placed in the checkout editor
- Check the same requirements as the renewal fill: the
zubs-main-producttag, a free item limit above zero, and collections with products in stock - If a collection has an availability schedule, check that a period covers the day of checkout
- If the plan overrides the fill, check that plan's settings rather than the store-wide ones
The upcoming orders list is shorter than expected
- Check Upcoming Orders List — in number mode the count is an upper limit, and in period mode only orders billing inside the period are listed
- If the subscription's plan overrides the setting, check the plan rather than the store-wide value
- In number mode, orders with no available products are hidden, so the page can show fewer than the count
- On a prepaid subscription the view groups deliveries by payment and ignores this setting
A per-plan override isn't taking effect
- Verify the override is saved on the correct selling plan (open the plan and check the Per-plan feature settings card)
- Confirm the customer's subscription is using the selling plan that has the override
- Check the Subscription Features settings page — the blue badge should list the plan
Pickup location selector not appearing
- Confirm the Pickup Locations toggle is enabled
- Verify at least one pickup location has been configured (see Custom Pickup Locations)
Need help? Contact support if you have questions about configuring subscription features for your store.