With prepaid subscriptions, you can create subscription plans that bill and generate orders at different frequencies. For example, you can create a plan to bill customers every three months and deliver products monthly.
Another everyday use case is for gift subscriptions, where you only bill the customer once but generate multiple fulfillment (orders). This example shows how it works for a 6-month prepaid subscription.
The video and instructions below use the Custom/Advanced selling plan type, but you can also use the Prepaid type to configure subscription gift options.
To configure a prepaid product, you will want to create a selling plan to configure the desired billing and shipping frequencies.
The bill every setting allows you to create plans with a different billing frequency than shipping. You set the Bill every setting to the number of fulfillments you want in the order. For example, Bill every 2 deliveries would create two fulfillments (orders). Setting Bill every to 3 deliveries would create 3 fulfillments (orders), and so on.
We will cover two popular use cases below. The first is a prepaid subscription that will not auto-renew. It will bill the customer once and place orders (aka fulfillments) multiple times. The second will be an auto-renewing prepaid subscription.
3-Month Prepaid Subscription
This example will bill the customer once and generate three fulfillments with a monthly delay between orders. The subscription will also remain active until the last fulfillment is sent out.
To configure the plan, set the Deliver every setting to 1 month. This sets the frequency of delivery. For example, how often the customer gets the product delivered. The Bill every setting is set to 3 deliveries to ensure that three fulfillments will be generated for the subscription.
Next, we'll set the Max number of payments to 1, so the plan will only bill customers once. Finally, we'll set the Finishing behavior to End of cycle to ensure the subscription remains active until the last fulfillment is complete.
The prepaid subscription will work like this:
When a customer purchases the prepaid subscription, the subscription status becomes active, and an order with three fulfillments is created in Shopify.
The first fulfillment will appear as unfulfilled, and two additional will be scheduled for future dates.
A month later, the 2nd fulfillment will change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify.
A month later, the 3rd (last) fulfillment will change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify.
Finally, the subscription status will change to expired (aka finished).
The order in Shopify will look like this:
Between shipments, the order status will toggle between unfulfilled and scheduled.
3-Month Prepaid Subscription (auto-renewing)
The second example is very similar. However, the Max number of payments setting will be set to Unlimited to ensure the prepaid subscription rebills customers every three months.
The auto-renewing prepaid subscription will work like this:
When a customer purchases the prepaid subscription, the subscription status will become active, and an order will be created in Shopify with 3 fulfillments.
The first fulfillment will appear unfulfilled, and two additional will be scheduled for future dates.
A month later, the 2nd fulfillment will change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify.
A month later, the 3rd fulfillment will change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify.
At the start of the fourth month, the customer will be billed again, another order will be created in Shopify with three fulfillments, and the process will repeat.
Note: The subscription status will remain active until the customer or admin has canceled the subscription AND the last fulfillment has been processed.
Prepaid Shipping Notes
When customers purchase a prepaid subscription, any applicable shipping fees from Shopify will be duplicated by the number of fulfillments being purchased. In the 3-month prepaid examples we covered above, the shipping charges would be multiplied by three. For example, if your Shopify shipping rules were configured to add $10 in shipping fees for the associated product, the total cost for shipping would be $30 ($10 x 3 orders).
Managing Prepaid Subscriptions in Shopify
Once purchased, prepaid subscriptions can be managed in two places: Shopify and the PayWhirl app.
The Shopify order details page shows already fulfilled orders and scheduled/upcoming fulfillments for prepaid subscriptions. You can also fulfill orders early if necessary by clicking the Fulfill Early link on the orders page.
From the PayWhirl app, you can see scheduled/upcoming fulfillments and reschedule them if necessary by clicking the pencil icons next to each fulfillment.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback. We're here to help!
Troubleshooting
Many third-party fulfillment apps like ShipStation, Pirate Ship and other order tracking apps have not been updated to import prepaid fulfillments. Because of this, the scheduled fulfillments might not generate new orders.
If you use a third-party fulfillment or order tracking app, please contact them to ensure they can import all the fulfillments associated with a prepaid subscription order.
If you have an older version of PayWhirl, you'll have to accept new app permissions. You can do this by clicking the question mark symbol on the create/edit plan page in PayWhirl.
Once you have accepted the required app permissions for prepaid subscriptions, you can set the Bill every setting when configuring your plans.
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Please contact our support team if you have any questions or problems configuring the app. We're happy to help!
Sincerely,
Team PayWhirl