❔What happens to a subscription when an item is unavailable?

Sometimes, products in your Shopify store are deleted, archived, or simply have gone out of stock.

Last updated: April 7, 2024

Deleted & Archived Products

In the case when a product or variant is deleted or archived, any customer subscriptions containing these items will be automatically paused to prevent missing items from subscription deliveries or unexpected transaction errors during billing.

From the customer's account, a banner will appear in these instances, guiding customers on necessary actions to resume their subscription. Whether it's swapping or removing the affected item, these changes aim to ensure a seamless experience for customers when needing to make adjustments to their subscriptions.

Customers will also receive an email notification informing them that their subscription has been paused. You can edit the contents of this email in your admin portal under Customer Notifications > Subscription Paused.

Customers will receive an email notification informing them of the update to their subscription. They'll also receive a corresponding “Item out of stock” email notification under Customer Notifications > Item out of stock or deleted.

Out of Stock Products

Bands have the option to custom rules around subscription behaviors based on your Shopify inventory settings. By default, if your Shopify product’s inventory settings under Subscription Programs > Global Settings are set to “Always create order and reduce inventory”. This means that Smartrr will always create the subscription order and decrement Shopify’s inventory.

However, you have the option to automatically PAUSE your customers’ subscriptions if an item in their order is out of stock by changing the setting to "Create order only if inventory is available / PAUSE".

In this case, when a product or variant is marked as out of stock in a shop's inventory, any customer subscriptions containing these items will be automatically paused to prevent missing items from subscription deliveries or unexpected transaction errors during billing.

From the customer's account, a banner will appear in these instances, guiding customers on necessary actions to resume their subscription.

Customers will also receive an email notification informing them that their subscription has been paused. You can edit the contents of this email in your admin portal under Customer Notifications > Subscription Paused.

Customers will receive an email notification informing them of the update to their subscription. They'll also receive a corresponding “Item out of stock” email notification under Customer Notifications > Item out of stock or deleted.