How to sell gift subscriptions on Shopify

Prepaid gift subscriptions are a great way to add another purchase option for customers browsing your Shopify store.

Ryan P. avatar
Written by Ryan P.
Updated over a week ago

Adding gift subscription options to Shopify is simple with PayWhirl. This guide will show you how to add prepaid gift options to your existing Shopify products with Subscription variants.

Gift Subscription Tutorial

Prepaid subscriptions are a great way to add gift subscriptions. They allow your customers to purchase subscriptions that will last X billing cycles (months, weeks, etc.) for friends or family.

Add gift subscription options to Shopify

In this tutorial, we'll create a basic gift subscription option for a 3-month subscription to a product in Shopify. To begin, we'll need to create a new selling plan group for our gift options.

Here are our selling plan group settings for this example:

To configure the gift subscription set the Deliver every setting to 1 month. This sets the frequency of delivery. The Bill every setting is set to 3 deliveries to ensure that three orders will be generated for the subscription.

Next, set the Max number of payments to 1, so it will only charge the purchaser once, and set the finishing behavior to End of cycle, ensuring the subscription remains active until the last fulfillment is complete.

Finally, we've added a note to the description field (optional) to explain how the gift subscription will work and to remind the purchaser to provide the recipient's shipping information during checkout.

The 3-month prepaid gift subscription will work as follows:

  • When a customer purchases the prepaid gift subscription, the subscription status will become active, and an order will be created in Shopify with three orders. The first order will appear unfulfilled, and two will be scheduled for future dates.

  • The next order will change from the scheduled status to the unfulfilled status in Shopify a month later. Then the last order will change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify a month later.

  • Finally, the subscription status will change to expired (aka finished)

Orders will

Between shipments, the order status will toggle between unfulfilled and scheduled.

To complete the process, you'll just want to make sure that you assign the new selling plan group to the product(s) in Shopify that you'd like the gift options to appear.

You can add the option to your product(s) from the PayWhirl app by clicking the "Add Products" or "Edit Product" button at the top right corner of the selling plan page.

Or you can assign the subscription to products directly from the product settings in Shopify.

Once completed, you should see the new purchase option on your product pages.

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Please let us know if you have any questions. We're happy to help!

Team PayWhirl

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