1. What is a Selling Plan Group

The Selling plan group is the basic starting point for subscriptions. Within the group, you can configure how subscriptions work for products in your Shopify store. These choices are displayed automatically once you have attached the selling plan group to the product in Shopify.

A selling plan group will contain at least one subscription selling plan. 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.

2. Creating the Selling Plan Group

To create a selling plan, you'll need to click on the plans tab and click create to make the selling plan group.

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 allow customers to choose the frequency of orders:

Note: The selling plans will be displayed according to the settings for our app block. You can adjust type by customizing your theme and adjusting the PayWhirl app block's settings :

Click to see examples of the display types

1. Modern App Block

2. Classic App Block

Once you create your new selling plan group, you must give it a name. To keep it simple, we call this plan "Subscribe and Save - Coffee".

If you click on the advanced options, you can specify a unique internal name and adjust the plan selector title.

The internal name is not visible to customers while the plan selector title will allow you to adjust the text in the selection widget. It defaults to "Deliver every," but you can change it to something else like "Bills Every" if it isn't a physical product.

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.

3. Creating the selling plans

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

There are 3 main types of plans:

Ongoing Subscriptions - Mainly used for subscribe-and-save with basic settings only
Prepaid - Billing upfront with a single order and multiple fulfillments. Can be set to renew automatically
Specific Dates - Select specific dates throughout the year, or day of the week, to bill customers
Custom/Advanced - Designed for more complex use cases such as anchors, cutoffs, and more.

In this example, we'll create a basic ongoing monthly subscription 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:

Subscription Selection Plan 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 (if applicable).

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 and Monthly for the frequency settings so the customers are charged monthly.

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.

Discount or custom 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.

To give customers additional frequency options click 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)