Learn how to manage and edit your subscription contracts and recurring orders in Subify. In this article, you’ll find everything you need to know about subscription orders, contracts, and how to effectively manage them.
What is a Subscription Contract?
A subscription contract is created when a customer subscribes to a product in your store. This contract includes a unique ID and outlines the agreement between the customer and the merchant for recurring purchases. These recurring purchases occur over a set or undefined period of time.
How Does Subi Create Subscription Orders?
When a customer subscribes to a product, Subi automatically processes recurring orders based on the product’s billing interval. For each billing attempt, Subi generates an order in Shopify. If the payment is successfully processed, the order is marked as "Paid" in your Shopify admin panel.
All recurring orders are linked to the corresponding subscription contract in Subi.
Where Can I See All My Subscriptions?
You can view and manage all your subscription contracts from the Subscription Contracts tab in the Subi panel.
Subscription Table Columns
In the subscriptions table, you will find all your subscriptions along with essential details such as product, billing status, and more. You can customize which columns appear by clicking the "Columns" button.
You can also sort subscriptions by the Next Order date to easily track upcoming billing cycles.
Search
To quickly locate a specific subscription, use the search functionality. You can search by:
Subscription contract ID
Customer email
Customer name
Product title (the product in the subscription)
Variant title (the product variant in the subscription)
Segments
The Subscriptions table has five segments at the top to help filter your subscriptions:
Active: Subscription contracts that are currently active.
Paused: Subscription contracts that are temporarily paused and will resume in the future.
Expired: Subscription contracts that have ended as per the agreed terms (all billing and delivery cycles completed).
Canceled: Subscription contracts that have been canceled.
Failed Payment: Subscriptions where the last billing attempt failed. [Learn more about failed payments]
How Can I Manage My Subscriptions?
You can manage and edit subscriptions from the subscription contract details page. To access it, search for a subscription in the table and click on it.
Each subscription contract includes the following sections:
Subscription Details: This section contains details such as the product, selling plan, price, next order date, and more.
Customer Information: This section includes payment details, shipping address, and a link to the customer portal.
Payment Method: Here you can see the payment method associated with the subscription, along with a link to update the payment method (an email will be sent to the customer for them to update their payment details).
Billing History: This section shows all recurring billing attempts for a subscription contract and their final status (successful or failed). Any retrial attempts for failed payments are also listed.
Note: The first order of a subscription is paid manually at checkout, so it does not appear in the billing history.Subscription Timeline: A chronological timeline of all events related to the subscription, such as status changes, order skips, and more. Events are listed in ascending order, showing who made each change—whether it was the merchant or the customer.
Functionalities to Manage the Subscription
Pause, Cancel, Reschedule, or Skip the subscription.
Editing fields like
Billing frequency
Billing type (Pay-per-delivery or Pre-paid) Products/variants in the subscription
Product quantities
Discounts
Shipping cost
How to Edit Subscription Contracts
Here are the changes you can make to subscription contracts directly from your panel:
Change the Status of a Subscription
Cancel or Pause
To stop future charges, you can click on the Cancel or Pause button. After canceling or pausing, the status of the subscription will change accordingly.
Activate or Resume
To restart a canceled or paused subscription, click the Activate or Resume button.
Change the Next Billing Day
Skip the Next Billing Day
If you want to skip the upcoming billing or order date, click the Skip button next to the next order date.
Reschedule the Next Billing Day
You can change the next order date by clicking Reschedule and selecting a new date from the calendar.
Edit Subscription Details
Click on Edit in the Subscription Details section to modify:
Billing frequency
Billing type (Pay-per-delivery or Prepaid)
Product details (change or remove products)
Product discounts
Product quantity
Shipping price
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How can I change the price of a subscription?
For Existing Subscriptions: To raise the price of a subscription for existing customers, you need to manually update the subscription contract:
Remove the existing product from the subscription.
Add the updated product with the new price back into the subscription.
Please note that price updates made in Shopify will not automatically apply to existing subscriptions. This is a necessary step to ensure the price change reflects in your existing contracts.
For New Subscriptions: To change the price for future subscriptions, simply update the product price in your Shopify admin panel under the Products section. This change will automatically apply to all new subscriptions.
Q: Why does it show only one subscription in my panel when a customer bought multiple subscriptions?
When a customer subscribes to multiple products with different frequencies (e.g., monthly, weekly), Subi categorizes these subscriptions by frequency. All products with the same delivery frequency (e.g., monthly) will be grouped together under one contract, and products with different frequencies (e.g., weekly) will be grouped into separate contracts.
In the Shopify admin panel, you may see a single order because the customer checked out together, but this doesn’t reflect the multiple subscription contracts.