Bold Subscriptions V1 allows you to offer your customers the ability to prepay for their subscription.
There are a number of reasons why customers would prefer to prepay instead of paying monthly, such as convenience, gifting, or to take advantage of discounts. Prepaid subscriptions are typically offered at tiered discounts, which incentivize your customers to prepay for longer periods of time.
Neither you or your customers will have to worry about payment disruptions with prepaid subscriptions.
This feature works when both Single and Multiple Products cart modes are enabled in Subscriptions V1, however, prepaid subscriptions are taken directly to the checkout which reflects the behaviour of Single Product cart mode.
Alert
This article is relevant to Version 1 of Bold Subscriptions. If you have Bold Subscriptions V2 on your store, please visit Subscriptions V2 Overview. If you are unsure of which version of Bold Subscriptions that you have on your store, please visit Identify Your Version of Bold Subscriptions.
Walkthrough
Setting your subscriptions up as prepaid will also allow your customers to purchase your products as gifts. You can view a demo of our gift subscription feature here.
Enabling gift subscriptions will display a checkbox on your product page that asks your customers if they're purchasing this product as a gift. If selected, they will be prompted for the recipient's shipping address.
When this setting is enabled and used, the subscription will expire at the end of the prepaid period even if you have the prepaid setting to continue to charge after a specific number of orders.
How it Works
Customers will be given the option to prepay when viewing the subscription product on your store.
Example
If the customer chooses to prepay, they will be brought directly to the recurring checkout to complete their purchase. This is expected as the process completely skips the cart page.
While in the checkout, the cost of the product, any applicable shipping charges, and any applicable taxes will be multiplied by the number of orders the customer has chosen to prepay for.
Once the order is placed, you will see an order be generated in the Shopify admin for the full cost of the order. Any prepaid reoccurring order will appear as $0.00 in the Shopify admin.
When setting up prepaid order lengths, instead of choosing No limit (which is used for non-expiring subscriptions), choose Set max numbers of recurring orders to.
You can insert as many order lengths as you like, as well as offer a percentage based discount for each length. You can also have them expire or auto-renew at the end of the subscription period.
Gift subscriptions will expire after the chosen length of time.
Pro-Tip
To set up your subscription from the start, please visit Standard Subscriptions. The guide below will show you how to add the prepaid options to your existing standard subscription group.
- From within Bold Subscriptions V1, select Subscriptions, then My Subscriptions.
- Select the ellipsis next to the subscription group you would like to make a Prepaid or Gift Subscription.
- Select Edit Subscription.
- Scroll down to Maximum Subscription Length.
- Select Set the max number for recurring orders to and enter length options.
- Select Allow customers to prepay for subscriptions. It should look something like this:
Note: If this option is unavailable or greyed out, you may need to remove the dynamic discount at the bottom of the page. To do this, deselect the option which says Offer different discounts on initial and recurring orders. For more information, please see Limitations below.
- Enter a number of orders you would like to offer for prepayment. You can add multiple options for your customers.
- Optional: Enter a % Off incentive for prepaying.
Note: Only a percentage amount can be applied to prepaid subscription discounts. If you are uncertain of what discount percentage to use, you can determine the discount percentage using the following percentage calculator tool.
- Choose whether the subscription renews or ends after the prepaid subscription is over by either selecting Continue charging or Expire.
- Optional: Select Make these products prepaid only.
- Optional: Select Make prepaid subscriptions always expire if you want all prepaid subscriptions to always expire once each prepaid subscription ends.
- Optional: Select Allow gift subscriptions? to allow gift subscriptions.
- Optional: Under Minimum Fulfilled Order Requirement, select Customers can cancel after at least X orders and enter a minimum order amount. This prevents customers from being able to cancel the subscription until a certain amount of orders have been generated on your store.
Note: When using the Minimum Fulfilled Order Requirement feature, we recommend updating your Terms and Conditions to reflect this information.
- Optional: Select Offer the same discount on all orders if you want to offer an additional discount and enter the discount amount.
- Select Save.
Adding items to prepaid recurring orders
When a customer first places an order for a prepaid subscription, the order generated in Shopify will be for the full cost of the number of orders they've opted to pay for. The reoccurring orders will generate as $0.00 in Shopify.
Adding items onto recurring orders which generate as $0.00 is not possible. If you add a product to a prepaid subscription order within Shopify, it will still complete the order at $0.00.
Dynamic discounts
Prepaid subscriptions do not support dynamic discounts. Dynamic discounts are discounts that change automatically from one amount to another after a certain number of orders have passed.
When creating prepaid subscriptions, the dynamic discount selection which says Offer different discounts on initial and recurring orders will be unavailable.
You can offer different discounts for prepaid subscriptions when setting up your prepaid options.
Pro-Tip
If you’d like to edit an existing group to change a standard subscription to prepaid, you will need to uncheck the selection shown above (if selected) before you can create prepaid subscriptions. Until then, the option to Allow customers to prepay for subscriptions will be unavailable.
Discount codes
Prepaid subscriptions work differently with minimum purchase offers. For more information please visit Discount Code Types & Setup.
Address changes
By default, customers with prepaid subscriptions cannot change their shipping address. This is because the shipping rate and costs are determined using the recipient's address at the time of purchase. Address changes could lead to shipping rate changes.
However, as the store admin, you can change the shipping address on your customer's behalf. It's important to note that when updating the shipping address for your customer's prepaid subscription, the customer is not automatically billed or refunded the difference.