How to Configure a Selling Plan Group

With our Shopify app, you can configure selling groups to give customers extra purchase options for your products

Larry Brager avatar
Written by Larry Brager
Updated over a week ago

The Selling plan group and its options allow you to configure how subscriptions work for products in your Shopify store. These choices are displayed automatically once you have attached the selling plan to the product in Shopify.

These plan options allow you to set the frequency, delivery interval, and discounts your customers have when they subscribe. Most commonly, merchants use these tools for subscribe and save, prepaid, rentals, and more.

When you first log in to the app, you'll see the app dashboard with setup instructions to configure the app. To create a selling plan, you'll need to click on the plans tab and click create.

Each selling plan group can have multiple selling plans. This is most commonly used to give customers a choice about frequency. Say offering delivery every week, every two weeks, or monthly.

This selling plan group has two selling plans options to specify the frequency of orders:

Once you have the plans configured, you can select the display options in your Shopify theme's settings for our app block:

Modern

Classic

Selling Plan Group

Once you create your new selling plan you will need to give it a name. To keep it simple we are calling this plan "Subscribe and Save - Coffee".

Name - This is the name used to identify the selling plan group in the app and the checkout. If you click on the advanced options, you can specify a unique internal name and adjust the plan selector title:

Plan selector title - This is displayed when customers view your selling plan group options on the product page. It defaults to "Deliver every," but you can change it to something else like "Bills Every" if it isn't a physical product.
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On the product page, it would look like this:

Note: Depending on your theme, it might look a bit different than the screenshots above. Each theme can style and place elements in different locations, but generally, this is how these settings will be displayed to customers.

Selling Plan Settings

In short, these are the purchase options you want to give a customer. These specify the billing frequency, delivery frequency, and optional discounts.

In this example, we'll create a monthly selling plan with a 15% discount.

Full Name - This is the name of the selling plan that will be displayed to customers in your cart, during checkout, and potentially on product pages (depending on your theme). Typically you will want to include the billing frequency in this name:
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Cart Preview

Plan Selector Label - This is the name of the selling plan that will be displayed to your customers on the product page where they select their subscription options. You may want to include the discount on the label.
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Deliver Every - This setting has two controls. It allows you to choose how often the selling plan will bill your customers and on what frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly). In our example, we'll select 1 for the interval and Monthly for the frequency settings so the customers are charged every month. If you wanted to bill the customers every two months, you'd select 2 for the interval and the monthly frequency.

The interval settings also control how often orders will be generated in your Shopify store. For example, if your selling plan bills the customer weekly, orders will be generated weekly.

Note: All payments will create orders in Shopify, even for non-physical products like a membership or rental.

Bill Every - This setting is mainly for prepaid subscriptions. It determines how many shipments are attached to a payment. For example, if you set the plan to bill every three deliveries, the initial order would have three prepaid deliveries associated with it. This results in the product price multiplied by the number of deliveries included. IE 3 prepaid deliveries per order would cost three times as much as a single delivery order.

Discount or manual price - This setting controls the pricing for the selling plan and works with the "adjustment value" setting.

There are four options for pricing selling plans:

  • None (not recommended) - Keeps the price the same as the selected product variant, with no adjustment. Adding a discount for recurring payments can increase conversion rates for subscriptions.

  • Fixed Amount Discount (recommended) - Lets you select a specific amount to discount the product variant if customers buy the selling plan.

  • Percentage Discount (recommended) - Lets you select a percentage-based amount to discount the product variant if customers buy the selling plan.

  • Manual Price - Let you specify a manual price for the selling plan.

In our example, we've offered customers a 15% discount for subscribing to monthly deliveries. This is commonly referred to as "subscribe and save" and is usually well-received by customers.

Clicking the 'add selling plan' link under the billing rules will allow you to create another selling plan for that group. This is how you can give the customer another frequency option (say every 2-month billing)

Advanced Settings

Description - This is displayed to customers on product pages after they select a specific selling plan. It's a good place to provide extra information about the specific selling plan and appears as a text block.
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This is how it looks in the classic view:

Min number of payments - This setting will control how many payments the customer must make before they can the subscription from the customer portal. This is helpful if your subscriptions require customers to be subscribed for a minimum number of payments. This is disabled by default and will require the merchant to cancel subscriptions manually via the admin if customers need to make changes before the minimum term has been met.

Max number of payments - This setting lets you control if subscriptions should be ongoing (continue indefinitely) or be canceled automatically after a specific number of payments have been completed. By default, it's set to unlimited, making the subscription rebill until the customer or the merchant cancels it.

For example, if you wanted a subscription to last for three payments, you would set the max number of fulfillments to 3. The system would automatically cancel the subscription after three payments were completed.

Anchor Day - The day of the week, month, or year to bill your customers.

First Delivery - When the first delivery (order) should be placed in Shopify. There are two options:

  • On Checkout will schedule the first order immediately after checkout.

  • On Anchor will schedule the first order on the next upcoming anchor day.

Cutoff Window - Skips the first delivery (order) if it's too close to the upcoming anchor date.

  • When the First Delivery setting is On Checkout, it will prevent two deliveries from being scheduled too close to each other.

  • When the First Delivery setting is On Anchor, it will jump ahead to the next anchor day to give you enough time to prepare the order.

Related Articles:

If you have any questions or problems configuring the app, please contact our support. We're happy to help.

Sincerely,

Team PayWhirl

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