Prepaid gift subscriptions allow customers to purchase a fixed number of deliveries upfront (for someone else or themselves) without surprise rebills. They’re perfect for holidays, BFCM campaigns, and any “gift of three / six / twelve months” offer.
In this guide, we’ll:
Show a recommended setup for prepaid gift subscriptions using PayWhirl selling plans.
Use a 3-month example you can duplicate for 2, 6, or 12 months.
Link to a short video tutorial for a visual guide.
Note: Shopify's native gift card functionality applies only to the initial payment for subscriptions, meaning alternative methods, such as prepaid subscriptions, are often necessary.
Watch the walkthrough (recommended):
Follow our step-by-step video on setting up prepaid gift subscriptions with PayWhirl on Shopify. It covers creating the selling plan group, configuring a fixed number of deliveries, and assigning it to your products.
Once you’ve watched (or if you’d rather read), continue with the steps below.
The video above 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 example, we’ll create a 3-month prepaid gift subscription for a single product. You can repeat these steps for other durations (2, 6, 12 months, etc.).
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 3-month gift:
The subscription becomes Active.
Shopify creates an order with:
The first fulfillment marked as unfulfilled.
Two additional fulfillments scheduled for future dates (months 2 and 3).
Each month, the next scheduled fulfillment becomes unfulfilled when it’s ready to ship.
After the final fulfillment is completed, the subscription status changes to 'Expired /Finished'.
Between shipments, you’ll see fulfillments move between scheduled and unfulfilled states in Shopify and PayWhirl.
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.
Key Recommendations and Best Practices
Use prepaid subscriptions as they offer a seamless experience.
Clearly communicate the duration and terms of the gift subscription upfront.
Turn to manual workarounds only if other options are unavailable due to their high maintenance requirements.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
The PayWhirl Team