Setting up a subscription group on your store will 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 items you want to include in the group, how frequently your customers will receive their products, and even offer them an incentive discount for subscribing.
This article will outline the functionality and walk you through the setup of your first subscription group.
Once a standard subscription group has been created and activated within Bold Subscriptions, a subscription widget will appear on the product page that customers will use to select their options to purchase. They will have the option to purchase the product as a subscription, or just as a one-time purchase.
If you would like to offer the product as a subscription only, you can enable the toggle next to Customers can only purchase these products with a subscription within the subscription group settings. This will ensure the product can only be purchased as a subscription.
When your customer proceeds into the checkout page with a subscription in their cart, they will be directed to the Bold Checkout. This checkout must be used so that the order is captured as a recurring payment.
By default, when a subscription product is added to your customer's cart, they will be able to continue shopping. This means that multiple items can be added to the cart prior to your customer checking out their order. Both subscriptions and one time purchases to be added to the cart and purchased at the same time.
You have the option to change this. Enabling the setting Send customers directly to checkout instead of adding to cart, will automatically take your customer to the checkout once they select Subscribe. If they wish to purchase any additional items, they will need to finish their subscription purchase and begin another shopping session.
The Subscription frequency options allow you to choose how often your recurring orders are generated. These options will be available for your customers to select when they purchase a subscription on your store.
There are two types of subscription frequencies. Non-fixed and fixed.
Non-Fixed Subscription Frequency
With non-fixed frequencies, orders will recur based on the day of your customers initial purchase. Because of this, each customer can have a different date at which their order will reoccur.
Daily subscriptions will recur every number of days you select, starting from the time of your customer's initial purchase.
Weekly subscriptions will recur every number of weeks, on the same day of the week that the original order was placed. For example, if an initial order is placed on a Thursday, the recurring order will complete every following Thursday on a weekly basis. If it is placed on a Monday, it will recur every Monday.
Monthly subscriptions will recur every number of months you select, on the same day of the month as the original order. If an order was placed on the 15th, it will recur every month on the 15th. If an order was placed on the 31st, the order for the next month will use the next closest date. For example, an order placed on Jan 31st will recur on feb 28th, or in the case of a leap year, it will recur on the 29th.
Yearly subscriptions will recur every number of years you select, on the month and day that the original order was placed.
Fixed Subscription Frequency
Fixed subscription frequencies are subscriptions that recur at fixed intervals. For example, they could recur each month on the 15th, every week on Monday, or the first weekend of each month (custom occurrence). This is different from non-fixed subscription frequencies because regardless of when the order was placed, all orders recur at the same time.
When using a fixed subscription frequency, it is best to use cutoff days. This feature is useful to ensure that the recurring order does not take place too soon after the initial subscription purchase on your store. For example, if you have a monthly subscription, you wouldn't want a customer to purchase a subscription on the 14th, and have another generate automatically on the 15th. You might want to skip that next order in this case.
Cutoff Days
Cutoff days are used with fixed subscription frequencies to set a minimum amount of time that must pass between your customer's first and second order. If the second scheduled order falls within the number of cutoff days you select, the second order will be skipped.
This prevents a subscriber's initial and second order from occurring too close together to ensure your customer is not charged twice before they have received their first order.
Example
If your billing date is on the 1st of every month, setting your cutoff days to 15 will mean that all initial orders placed 15 days before the 1st, will not be charged again on the next recurring date. That order will be skipped.
If you need more time to fulfill your orders, you can increase the number of cutoff days.
Typically, we recommend 15 cutoff days for monthly subscriptions, but it can vary across different cases.
The cutoff day controls are available depending on the recurrence type you select under the Advanced options, such as specific day of the month or custom occurrence.
For more information on custom frequencies, please visit our RRULES in Bold Subscriptions article.
A product should only belong to one subscription group. The default subscription widget will display the subscription options from the first group a product is added to.
Pro-Tip
If you would like to add a product to multiple subscription groups in order to show different discounts per frequency option, you can customize the subscription widget to support this using our APIs.
To create your subscription group, please follow the steps below.
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From 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.
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Select Confirm.
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Select Customers can only purchase these products with a subscription. (optional)
Note: This feature will remove the one-time purchase option from the subscription widget on the product page.
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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:
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On purchase day: This will cause the customer's subscription to renew based on the first date of their purchase.
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On 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.
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Custom occurrence: This allows you to set up custom logic for when your customers subscriptions will renew. Additional choices will show after selecting this option.
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Enter Frequency name.
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Select Save Frequency.
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Select Send customers directly to checkout instead of adding to cart. (optional)
Note: When this feature is enabled, it will take your customers to the checkout right away with only this subscription product in their cart. This step completely skips the cart page, and will stop your customers from continuing shopping.
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Select Offer a discount for subscribing. (optional)
Note: This provides a Subscribe & Save incentive to your customers.
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Select Save Changes.