This article outlines some of the most frequently asked questions regarding subscription groups and their functionality within Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout. Please select a question below to view the answer.
This article is relevant to Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout. If you have Subscriptions V1 on your store, please visit Bold Subscriptions V1 Overview. If you are unsure of which version you have, please visit Identify Your Version of Bold Subscriptions.
Currently, there is a limit of 250 products 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. Customers with existing subscriptions will be unaffected by price changes made within the admin. Their subscriptions will remain at the same price as when they originally subscribed - as per their subscription agreement. Only new subscribers would be subject to the new price.
If you wish to update the product price for your existing subscribers, this can be done through the use of our APIs. It is recommended to have your own developer for this. For more information on how to get started with our APIs, please visit our Developer Documentation.
Alternatively, if you are unable to use our APIs, as a work-around, you can create a new product at the new price point, and swap the old product out for the new one. You will need to add the new product to the existing subscription group before it can be swapped. For more information on swapping, please visit Subscription Management: Merchant Perspective.
Since Bold Subscriptions uses the Shopify checkout to process orders, the shipping and tax rates will come from your settings in Shopify.
Shopify uses the least expensive shipping rate for recurring orders. For more information please visit Shipping Rates in Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout.
For more information on setting up shipping rates in Shopify, please visit Shopify's article, Setting up shipping rates. To set up tax rates in Shopify, please visit Shopify's Tax article.
There currently isn't a setting in Bold Subscriptions 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, it can only discount the product price via a discount code or a recurring discount in the subscription group's settings.
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 occur at 12 AM, within your stores time zone.
A transaction will be sent from Bold Subscriptions to Shopify Payments on the same day that your customer's 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 for your store.
You can see this information within Bold Subscriptions under Settings > General settings.
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.
Read more information about dunning management, please visit Cancellation & Dunning Management in Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout.
Digital products are compatible with Bold Subscriptions. 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.
Dynamic "Buy Now" buttons are only compatible when using Shopify Payments as your payment gateway.
If you are not using Shopify Payments as your payment gateway, this button skips the necessary add to cart functionality that Bold Subscriptions 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 refer to Shopify's article: Adding and removing dynamic checkout buttons.
All customizations completed for the Bold Subscriptions language settings and widget can be completed by making adjustments to the theme liquid code unless you are using the app block functionality provided in 2.0 themes.
To view our guide on completing adjustments to the widget for all themes, please visit Customize the Subscriptions Widget.
Prepaid or gift subscriptions are not available at this time; however, they are expected to be released in the future.
Dynamic discounts such as these are not available out of the box at this time.
Dynamic discounts can be achieved through the use of our APIs. It is recommended to have a developer for this customization. If you do not have a developer, you can reach out to one of our Partners for a quote here.
Alternatively, you could create a discount code that is applicable to the first order only. Discount codes will stack with an existing Subscription group discount. For example, if you have a 10% discount set within the subscription group, and create a discount code for an additional 10% off the first order only, customers would receive 20% discount off the first order and 10% off all recurring orders.
The ability to set minimum or maximum lengths for subscriptions are not currently available out of the box in Bold Subscriptions.
Maximum lengths can be accomplished by leveraging our APIs. It is recommended to have a developer for this customization. If you do not have a developer, you can reach out to one of our Partners for a quote here.
Bold Subscriptions now includes customer tagging. Subscriptions will automatically apply a tag to your subscribers customer profile within Shopify with a tag of active_subscriber or inactive_subscriber based on the status of their subscription.
For more information, please visit Customer Tagging in Subscriptions for Shopify Checkout.
Yes. You can create test orders in Shopify by using the test mode in Shopify Payments. If you are not using Shopify Payments, you can use the Shopify Bogus Payment Gateway. For more information, please visit Shopify's Help Center article.
Order times will default to 12:00am based on your store's timezone. Once an order is in the processing stage, it can take anywhere from 1-5 hours to process depending on the queue of orders at the time.
Please note that customers and merchants will not be able to make changes to a subscription while it is in the processing stage.
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.
As Shopify makes new customer accounts available to merchants, we are working to support this feature in Bold Subscriptions. At this time we do not recommend switching to the new version in order to ensure your customers are still able to access their Customer Portal.
For more information on Shopify's customer accounts, please visit Shopify's support article on Customer accounts.
If you have access to Shopify's new customer accounts, please make sure classic customer accounts are enabled by following the steps below.
- From within your Shopify admin, select Settings, then Checkout and accounts.
- Scroll to the Customer accounts section.
- In the Account experience section, select Edit.
- In the Login experience section, select one or both of the following options:
- Show login link in the header of online store and at checkout
- Require all customers to log in before checkout
- In the Choose which version of customer accounts to use section, select Classic customer accounts.
- Select Save.
Changing your store's default currency can cause issues with transaction fees. If you would like to make this change, please reach out to our Customer Success team so we can help align with this adjustment.