Subscriptions are powerful tool to improve customer repeat rate. When a customer subscribers to a product or service, their card details are saved by Shopify and they are billed automatically basis the billing frequency defined in the selling plan. 

We have seen subscriptions working well in beauty & personal care, food & beverages, fashion & apparel, digital content (courses), home goods, pets and animals... most of the e-commerce essentially. 

• Create Subscription Groups
• Create Selling Plans
• Map Products to Subscription Groups
• Activate subscription widgets on product pages
• Monitoring and marketing

Create Subscription Groups 

Subscription groups are different ways of selling the product. Products are generally sold for "One Time Purchase" which means customer would pay once for the immediate purchase and that's it. Subscription groups enable us to give more options to customers to order with you. For instance:

• Subscription orders - instead of buying products once, customers can subscribe for products. "Subscribe & save" or "Subscribe to save" are very common subscription group name.
• Prepaid orders - customer can pay upfront for future orders. "3 months prepaid orders" is common example of subscription group name here. 

Create Selling Plans 

A subscription group can have multiple selling plans. Selling plans have 3 important configurations:

• Billing frequency - how frequently customer would be billed. Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly and so-on.
• Delivery frequency - in most of the cases, billing and delivery frequency are same but in case of prepaid orders, you can have monthly billing frequency and weekly delivery frequency. This means that customer would be billed once a month (monthly billing frequency) while the order will created weekly (weekly delivery frequency)
• Discounts - a selling plan may have fixed amount discount or a % discount. This means as a merchant you can choose to give 5% discount on monthly billing frequency but 10% discount on weekly billing frequency.

Selling plans are shown to the customer under purchase plans as shown below.

Map Products 

Once a subscription group and selling plans have been created, products should mapped to the subscription group. One product can be mapped to multiple subscription groups as well. 

For example, a coffee product can be mapped "Subscribe and Save" or "3 months prepaid coffee" subscriptions where each of these subscription groups will have their own selling plans.

Activating Subscription Widget

Once products are mapped to subscription groups, subscription widget can activated on the theme. A good way to do this would be to create a duplicate theme and install the Loop widgets in the theme to check if subscriptions are working well or not. When the subscription widgets are visible on the products page, place a test order to check the flow end-end. 

Monitoring and marketing 

Once customers start subscribing, it's important to keep track of their growth & cancelations which you can do on the Loop Portal. You can also activate emails for 30+ important events & actions like subscription creation & cancelation, payment reminder, payment failed etc to both yourself and customers from the settings page. 

Before we jump to marketing to acquire new subscribers, it's also important to understand that we should focus on reducing the cancelations of existing subscriptions. The biggest reason for subscription cancelation is lack of customer control on subscription and to solve for this - we give a powerful customer portal to customer where they can pause subscription, skip next order and even schedule billing for future orders. You can chose to not give access of all these controls to customers but it is important to educate the customer so they don't end-up canceling the subscriptions. 

Lastly for marketing and acquiring new subscribers, sending emails to existing customers is the best strategy if you are already a running business. Giving initial discount to customers to become subscribers also goes the long-way. You can further promote subscriptions on homepage of your online store, social media handles and modify your one-time order confirmation email to talk about subscriptions. 

Start by creating your first selling plan here - link