Setting up a subscription group on your store is a great way to allow your customers to purchase any of your products on a recurring basis.
Within Bold Subscriptions, you can create a group which determines which products you would like to offer your customers as a Subscription. You can select each of the item(s) you want to include in the group, how frequently your customers will receive their products, and even offer them an incentive discount for subscribing.
At this time, only standard subscriptions can be created within Bold Subscriptions V2. Please visit Bold Subscriptions V1 & V2 Comparison for more information on the features available.
Pro-Tip
Once your subscription groups are set up, please visit our Customize Subscription Widget for more information on adjusting the language or styling on your product pages.
Setup
When creating your subscription, you will be presented with multiple features that can be enabled within the group.
Alert
Once you create a Subscription group, you are able to also create a Test Order for that product through Shopify Payments. For more information, please visit Shopify's article on Creating a Test Payment on your store.
For an explanation of these features and a step-by-step on creating your subscription group, please follow these steps:
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Within Bold Subscriptions, select Subscription Groups.
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Select Create Subscription Group.
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Enter a Group name.
Note: This is an internal name, your customers will not see it.
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Select Select Products.
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Select the checkbox beside all of the products you'd like to include in the group.
Note: At this time, digital products will not require a shipping address be entered in the checkout.
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Select Confirm.
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Set your Subscription Frequency. Select Days, Weeks, Months or Years.
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Select Show advanced options.
There are a few different options to choose from:
On Purchase Day
This will cause the customer's subscription to renew based on the first date of their purchase.On a Specific Day of the Month
This will cause the customer's subscription to renew on the same day every month; regardless of their date of purchase.Note: If this option is selected, you will see the optional feature to Use cutoff days. For more information on cutoff days, please see What Are Cutoff Days? below in the FAQs.
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Enter Frequency name.
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Select Save Frequency.
- Select Add new frequency and repeat steps 7 - 10 for additional frequency intervals.
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Select Offer a discount for subscribing. (optional)
Note: This provides a Subscribe & Save! incentive to your customers. Discounts applied within this area for Bold Subscriptions V2 will be reoccurring on every order for this product.
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Select Save Changes.
Offer as Subscription only
By default, all products added to the Subscriptions app will be available as recurring purchases, or one-time purchases. Setting the subscription as "only to be purchased as a subscription" will remove the option for a one-time purchase on the product page widget.
If you would like your items to be available by subscription only, please follow these steps:
- Once you're done creating your subscriptions, navigate to the Shopify admin.
- Select Products > All Products.
- Find a subscription product.
- Select Only allow purchase of this product as a subscription.
- Select Save.
FAQs
Currently, there is a limit of 250 products that could be added per Subscription group.
No, when a product is selected in a subscription group, all of the variants that exist for the product will be available to purchase as a recurring subscription.
No, all existing subscriptions will remain at the same price. All existing subscriptions would need to be updated one by one in order to reflect the new price set from within your Shopify admin.
If a subscription widget has been activated in Bold Subscriptions and is not appearing on the storefront, this can result in one of the following:
- Your payment gateway is not connected. In order for the subscriptions widget to appear on the product page, your store must use Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, or Authorize.net to process your customer's payments. Please visit Shopify Payments for more information on setting up and configuring Shopify Payments on your store.
- Missing Liquid Code/Incomplete Installation. In order for the subscription widget to appear on the product page, a liquid code update is needed on your store's theme. Please visit Installation Guide for Bold Subscriptions V2 for steps that you can follow to request a liquid code installation or complete the installation yourself.
Since Bold Subscriptions uses your store's Shopify checkout to process orders, this means that many of the adjustments made are done directly within Shopify.
- Shipping Rates - Bold Subscriptions will use the shipping rates that you have built-in to your Shopify admin to determine the costs for your customers. This can be adjusted within the Settings > Shipping area of your store.
- Tax Rates - Tax Rates are also determined by what has been input into your Shopify settings admin. The Bold Subscriptions app will pull these rates, and apply them to your customers orders on your store.
No, there currently isn't a setting in Bold Subscription V2 that allows you to charge a one-time fee for only the first order. Bold Subscriptions does not have the ability to charge a higher price rate for a product, but rather, only discount the product price via a discount code or a recurring discount.
We recommend changing the price of the product or product(s) to include the processing fee and set the products to subscription only on the product pages in you Shopify admin.
Example
Let's say you are offering a security system and would like to add a charge for an installation fee. The monthly security system costs $90.00, and the installation fee is $10.00.
You would set the product price for the security system in your Shopify admin to $100.00, then offer a 10% discount code to change the product price to $90.00 after the first initial order.
If you would like to add a processing fee automatically without the use of a discount code, this kind of customization would need to be added by either a third party developer or our Partners team. If you are interested in getting this customization added to your store, you can reach our Partners team by filling out the following form here.
A free subscription can be offered to a customer by providing the customer with a discount code that discounts the entire order by 100%.
Discount codes can be created in the Shopify admin under Discounts. Please visit Create discount codes for steps on creating a discount code in your Shopify admin.
Pro-Tip
You can select individual customers that the discount code applies to when creating a discount code in your Shopify admin. This allows you to target specific customers that are eligible for the discount code.
Recurring orders within Bold Subscriptions V2 occur at 12 AM, within your stores time zone.
When you have customer subscriptions that are set to renew, a transaction will be sent from Bold Subscriptions to Shopify Payments on the same day that the subscriptions are set to renew. Once the transaction has been successfully processed within Shopify Payments, an order for all successful transactions will be generated based on the Daily processing time set on your store:
If a transaction fails due to a payment or inventory related issue (invalid credit card, expired credit card, insufficient inventory, etc.), an order will not be generated in your Shopify admin. Bold Subscriptions will attempt to renew the subscription again using the applied settings in Bold Subscriptions under Settings > Dunning management:
Digital products should work with Bold Subscriptions V2. However, purchasing this type of subscription will not prompt your customer to enter a shipping address within the checkout.
If a digital product is swapped with a physical product after the initial purchase, they will be prompted to enter a shipping address at that time.
No. Dynamic "Buy Now" buttons on your product pages will skip the necessary "add to cart" functionality that Bold Subscriptions V2 requires when your customers add products to the checkout. This may cause orders being processed without created as a subscription on your store.
To remove this button from your store, please follow the steps on the Dynamic Checkout Buttons on Shopify article.
Yes. You can swap out a customer's product for another product from within the app admin.
Caution
- You can only swap between the products that are within the same subscription group.
- Product swaps do not retain subscription discounts. Any subscription discount will be removed once a product swap is performed.
- In the Shopify Admin, go to Apps.
- Select Bold Subscriptions.
- Select Customers.
- Find the customer you want to swap the products of.
- Under the Actions column click the ellipsis button and then select Manage Subscriptions.
- Scroll down and click Products in your subscription.
- Select Swap product.
- Select your preferred product and then click Select product.
- Select Swap products.
When a customer subscribes to a product from your store, the initial charge will be taken immediately at the time of purchase. If the initial purchase was on the 12th and you have set the subscription frequency to recur on a specific day of the month such as the 15th - without using cutoff days, the next charge would occur 3 days later.
Cutoff days are used to prevent a subscriber's initial and second orders from falling too close together, resulting in the customer being charged twice before receiving their first product. This feature enables you to better match the billing cycle to your fulfilment cycle.
Example
If your billing date is on the 15th, setting your cutoff days to 5 will mean all new orders placed on or after the 10th (5 days before the 15th) will not be charged again on the next recurring date and will instead move to the next subscription cycle. If you want more time between the first and second order, you can increase the number of cutoff days.
Typically, we recommend 15 cutoff days for monthly subscriptions, but it can vary across different cases.
