💸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 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.

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.

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:

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).