Configuring prepaid and gift subscriptions

Prepaid subscriptions allow customers to pay upfront for multiple orders and receive their products on scheduled dates as per the delivery frequency configured on the subscription.


Different use cases for prepaid subscriptions

Improve subscription retention by offering more incentives to customers to pay upfront for multiple orders. While a monthly subscription may cost $10, opting for a 3-month prepaid subscription might cost only $25, and a 6-month prepaid subscription may cost $50 only.

Customers can gift subscriptions to their friends & family, where the subscription is paid fully in advance and can be configured to auto-expire after a set number of orders.


Setting up prepaid subscriptions

Let’s take a scenario where we want to offer a health juice subscription where a customer will be getting the product delivered daily or every 2 days.

Now, as a merchant, you would not want to daily bill the user and instead want to offer a monthly subscription.

Step-1 Go to the Selling Plans tab and click on “Create Selling Plan” button

Step 2: When creating the selling plan ensure that “Is this a prepaid selling plan?” is checked.

Step-3 In the frequency selector section, modify the charge every setting to your liking. This setting is a function of the delivery cycles.

Step-4 Save the selling plan group

–> Learn more about how Creating Selling Plans .

Step-6 Click on the Add Products button and Map Products to Selling Plan

Step-7 That’s it. Now, go to the product page on your store and verify if everything is looking okay.

As the product price is $12.00, the price after applying 15% discount will come to be $10.20, which will be the per-delivery price. As the customer is charged for every 30 deliveries, the subscription price will come out to be $10.20 * 30 = $306.00


Gifting use-case in prepaid subscriptions

To allow your customers to purchase subscriptions as a gift for their friends & family which auto-expires after certain payments, you would only need to configure maximum billing cycles for the selling plan.

Next, click on the “Maximum Billing Cycles” dropdown and select the number of payments after which the subscription should auto-expire. Note that the first order is also counted as a cycle

Click on the “Save” button to save the changes. And that’s all.

Keep in mind that for a prepaid subscription, one billing cycle represents multiple deliveries. So let’s say you have made a 3-month prepaid subscription with monthly delivery, which means that for every billing. 3 orders will be created. So, if you want to auto-expire a subscription after three orders, you should select maximum billing cycles as one and not 3.


Suggested Reads

Here are a few articles that you may find helpful, and we suggest you go through the same.

  1. Subscription Models and Examples
  2. How does Shopify handle Prepaid Subscriptions

Facing Issues?

If you have any queries or doubts about any of these steps. Please reach out to support@loopwork.co

Thanks
Loop Subscription Team

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