Understanding Shopify selling plan groups
In Shopify's data model, subscription plans are called selling plans and they live inside selling plan groups. A selling plan group holds one or more selling plans (e.g. 'every month' and 'every 3 months') and is attached to one or more product variants. Every selling plan has three policy components: a billing policy that determines how often the customer is charged, a delivery policy that determines how often the order is created, and a pricing policy that sets the discount relative to the one-time price.
- Billing and delivery cadences can differ — bill monthly, ship weekly, for example
- One selling plan group should cover all variants of a product, not one group per variant
- Pricing policy can be a flat discount (e.g. 10% off) or a fixed price (e.g. always $29)
- Plan names appear in the widget and at checkout — keep them clear and customer-facing
Choosing cadences: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and custom
The right delivery cadence depends entirely on your product's consumption rate. Perishables like fresh food or flowers often suit weekly or biweekly cadences. Supplements and coffee typically fit monthly. Skincare and household goods often suit every 6–8 weeks. Offering a single monthly option and nothing else is the most common plan design mistake — it forces customers whose consumption rate doesn't match into a subscription that either builds up inventory or runs out before the next shipment, both of which trigger cancellations. Giving subscribers control over their cadence after signup (via the customer portal) reduces this churn significantly.
Discount tiers and the psychology of commitment
The standard subscribe-and-save model offers a modest discount (5–15%) for monthly subscriptions. Tiered discounts — where longer commitments unlock greater savings — are more effective at acquiring high-LTV subscribers but require careful margin modelling. A 25% discount on a prepaid annual plan only makes sense if the subscriber's purchase frequency without the subscription would be higher than your assumed discount. The other lever is non-monetary value: early access, exclusive variants, free shipping, and personalised notes often convert better than a deeper percentage discount, particularly in the $40–$120/month range.
- Month-to-month: 5–10% discount — low commitment, higher churn
- Prepaid 3-month: 12–15% discount — moderate commitment, lower churn
- Prepaid 6-month: 15–20% discount — strong commitment signal, LTV boost
- Prepaid 12-month: 20–25% discount — highest LTV, requires strong brand trust
Assigning plans to products at scale
Most subscription apps let you assign selling plans to products one at a time, which is manageable for a catalogue of five SKUs but impractical for a store with fifty. Bulk plan assignment — where you apply a plan group to a collection or a filtered list of products in a single action — is critical for merchants who launch subscriptions across an existing catalogue. When planning your rollout, decide first whether you want a single universal plan group or product-specific plans. Universal plans are simpler to manage; product-specific plans let you offer different cadences and discounts on different product types.
Prepaid vs pay-as-you-go: operationally different businesses
Prepaid subscriptions collect the full amount for multiple cycles upfront and then fulfil each period without a billing event. Pay-as-you-go subscriptions charge on each renewal date. These are not just different payment structures — they create different operational realities. Prepaid plans have no payment failure risk after the initial charge and produce a large upfront cash flow event, but they require careful refund and proration logic if a subscriber cancels mid-period. Pay-as-you-go plans have ongoing payment failure risk and require a dunning strategy, but cancellations are cleaner. Most merchants start with pay-as-you-go and introduce prepaid as a premium retention and acquisition incentive once the core subscription is established.
- Prepaid: no dunning needed, strong cash flow, complex cancellation logic
- Pay-as-you-go: simpler refunds, requires dunning infrastructure, most common model
- Hybrid: offer both and let the customer choose at checkout
Plan versioning and migrating existing subscribers
Subscription plans change over time — you'll want to add a new cadence, adjust a discount, or retire a plan entirely. The critical constraint is that you cannot change the terms of an existing subscriber's contract without their consent. When you need to update plan terms, the right approach is to create a new selling plan with the new terms and migrate subscribers to it with appropriate notice, giving them the option to cancel if the new terms don't suit them. Silently modifying selling plans that active subscribers are on is both a Shopify policy violation and a trust-destroying practice that produces cancellation spikes.