How to Manage Subscriptions (Essential Subscriptions app)

The Subscriptions page is where you view and manage every subscription on your store. While customers can manage their own from the portal, you can also step in to make changes, skip orders, update details, or help a customer with a payment issue. You can also create a subscription from scratch with the Create subscription button in the top right, see How to Create a Subscription for a Customer Manually.

Note: There is no pause, cancel or reactivate button for merchants. Those actions belong to the customer, in the customer portal. What You Can Change, and What Only Your Customer Can Do lists both sides.

The Subscriptions List

Open Subscriptions in the sidebar. Each row shows:

Filtering and searching

Filter by status using the tabs along the top:

• All
• Active
• Paused
• Expired
• Cancelled
• Failed, where Shopify has put the whole subscription into a failed state
• Failed last payment, where the most recent charge was declined but the subscription may still be retrying

The difference between those last two matters when you are chasing a payment. It is explained in When Customers Are Charged, and What Happens When a Payment Fails.

Use the search box to find a subscription by customer name, email, or contract ID (type at least 3 characters).

Click any row to open the subscription's detail page.

The Subscription Detail Page

The detail page shows everything about one subscription and lets you make changes.

Subscription details

The main card shows the status, the products with quantities and prices, the delivery and billing policy, the discount, and a pricing summary (subtotal, shipping, taxes, total).

Editing the policy Click Edit policy to open Edit delivery, billing and pricing policy. From here you can change:

• Deliver every — the delivery frequency.
• Bill every — the billing frequency, plus the Charge on day for weekly/monthly plans.
• Subscription expires automatically after — end after a set number of payments.
• Customers can cancel — require a minimum number of payments before cancelling.
• Discount — percentage or fixed amount, and an optional rule to change the discount after a number of payments.

Click Save to apply.

Note: Edit policy is not shown on prepaid subscriptions, or on subscriptions that are cancelled or expired. A prepaid customer has already paid for deliveries they have not received, so the plan is fixed. See Prepaid and Pay as You Go Subscriptions Explained.

Orders

The Orders card has two tabs:

• Upcoming — the next scheduled orders. Click Skip to skip an upcoming order, or Unskip to restore one you skipped.
• Past — orders already created. Each links to the order in your Shopify admin; skipped cycles are marked Skipped.

Timeline

The Timeline card is a running history of the subscription. It records who did what and when:

• Created, and whether that was the customer at checkout or you
• Paused, resumed, cancelled or expired, with the reason the customer gave if you run a cancellation or pause survey
• Frequency, billing, discount, address and payment method changes
• Product changes
• Orders placed, skipped and unskipped
• Failed payment attempts, with the card, the reason and the next retry date
• Retention offers the customer accepted
• Customer emails that were sent, with the recipient

Click an email address in the timeline to copy it.

Customer Details (Sidebar)

Customer

Shows the subscriber's name and email, linked to their Shopify customer record.

Shipping address Click the edit icon to open Edit shipping address and update the name, address, city, postal code, country, and province/state.

Payment method

Shows the card brand, last four digits, and expiry. If the customer needs to update their card, click Send link to update card. Shopify then emails the customer a secure update link. This is Shopify's email, not one of the app's, so it is not affected by your notification or email design settings. If no card is on file, this shows No payment method.

Common Tasks