Ctrlk
For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt. This page is also available as Markdown.

💸Prepaid subscriptions

Prepaid subscriptions allow your customers to pay for their recurring subscription deliveries upfront.

Prepaid subscriptions are used when you'd like customers to pay upfront for a set number of subscription deliveries. One common use-case is to offer a percentage discount to a customer for prepaying annually on monthly subscription deliveries. Another is when a gifter would like to give a giftee a recurring subscription with all expenses paid upfront for a certain period of time.

To turn a selling plan into a prepaid selling plan, simply change the delivery interval under the "Prepaid" tab on the selling plan card (note: prepaid isn't available if the selling plan's interval type is "days").

To offer a prepaid subscription, you’ll need to amend the billing schedule for a Subscription Program.

Navigate to Subscription Programs under CONFIGURATION in the left-hand menu and click on Create program.

Offer a prepaid option in your main subscription program, or create a new subscription program to offer the prepaid subscription on specific products.

You can create a prepaid offering by changing the settings in the Prepaid tab. The interval type will automatically be matched to the interval type in Basic details.

When editing the prepaid's delivery interval, the default value/frequency will be the same as the billing interval that's set under the "Basic details" tab. The delivery interval should be lesser than the billing interval (i.e. if billing interval is 6 months, the delivery interval should be less than 6 months.

How it works?

Prepaid subscriptions are treated differently compared to regular interval-based subscriptions. They require that customers pay the full price for the interval/frequency. What this means? If my 60 pack Yogurt costs $120 and I created a 3 month prepaid subscription (monthly delivery) for it, that means a customer would have to pay $360 ($120 x 3) at checkout for this order.

The 1st prepaid order will look like this:

Prepaid orders are marked with the "Scheduled" status in Shopify, instead of the "Unfulfilled" status. This is how Shopify treats orders for subscriptions with anchors or prepaid setups. Shopify gives you the ability to fulfill the orders early, if needed.

It is scheduled in Shopify, and will have the next fulfillment date set to a distant future date. This is required by Shopify to handle the upcoming orders in the prepaid subscription. On the customer's end, they can control when they want their next delivery within their prepaid cycle. Using our 3 month prepaid subscription example, the cycle ends once the customer gets their 3rd delivery. Once the prepaid cycle ends, the customer is billed for another cycle (or 3 months in this scenario).

PreviousSubscription discount codes
NextSequential Flow Builder?

Last updated