Adding gift subscription options to Shopify is simple with PayWhirl. This guide will show you how to add prepaid gift options to your Shopify products using subscription variants.
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.
Gift Subscription Tutorial
Prepaid subscriptions are a great way to add gift subscriptions. They allow your customers to purchase subscriptions for friends or family that will last X billing cycles (months, weeks, etc.).
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 customer once, and ensure it doesn't automatically renew. 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.
A month later, the next order will change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify, and the last order will also change from scheduled to unfulfilled in Shopify.
Finally, the subscription status will change to expired (aka finished)
This is how prepaid subscriptions will appear in Shopify...
Between shipments, the order status will toggle between unfulfilled and scheduled.
Just so you know, 3rd party fulfillment providers like ShipStation, Pirate Ship, and other order-tracking apps may require additional configuration to ensure they work seamlessly with prepaid subscription orders. You'll notice this warning in PayWhirl when configuring prepaid subscriptions.
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.
You can also 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.
Related Articles:
Please let us know if you have any questions. We're happy to help!
Team PayWhirl