A selling plan group is a collection of selling plans. Selling plans allow you to sell products on subscription on your store. They attach to products or variants to provide a set discount, shipping policy, and billing policy.

The subscription discount is not the same as a discount code, it is a price override.

There are four types of selling plan groups:

To create a selling plan navigate to Subscription Setup > Selling Plans and click New Selling Plan Group.

You can give your selling plan group a name, but if you do not the name will default to New {Type} Selling Plan Group. Please note you cannot have two selling plan groups of the same name. You can change the name during the creation process by updating the Admin Label.

You can associate the selling plan group with product(s) and/or variant(s) by clicking the Add New Products or Add New Variants buttons.

Adding a product will add all of the variants for that product to the selling plan group and if any new variants are added to the product, then those will be added to the selling plan group automatically.

Adding a variant will add only that variant of that product to the selling plan group. If new variants are added to the product for that variant, then those variants will not automatically be added to the selling plan. This is useful for when you want to create different value selling plan groups for different variants OR if you only want to offer some variants of a product on subscription.

Once products or variants are added to the selling plan group, you'll see see them in the Products section. You can remove them from the selling plan group by clicking the trashcan icon.

Products will display with their product image (if available) and their Shopify product gid (gid://shopify/Product/{productId}). Variants will display with their variant (if available) and their Shopify variant gid (gid://shopify/ProductVariant/{variantId}).

When you are creating a Selling Plan Group there will always be one selling plan available to be filled out.

Every selling plan type will consist of the same 6 fields*, but calendar, prepaid, and calendar prepaid will have additional fields which dictate their behavior.

Selection Label - This is the label used by the subscription buybox for selecting the selling plan option on the product detail page for the products and variants in the Selling Plan Group. They will also appear in the Purchase options section in Shopify.

Checkout / Cart Label - This will be shown in the cart and at checkout underneath the product.

Type - The type of discount used for the product at checkout:

Discount Value - The value of the discount.

Enable First Order(s) Policy - This will be used instead of the standard discount at checkout. Learn more below.

*Billing Schedule Interval Type - How often the subscription will create orders. Values are Days, Weeks, Months, Years.

*Billing Schedule Interval Value - The value of the billing interval. 1 Day frequencies are not supported.

These four values will reflect in the recurring subtotal value in the Shopify Checkout.

*Billing Schedules may not used for all Calendar Selling Plans.

Standard Selling Plan Groups are the most common type you will see and offer customers the most flexibility to manage their subscription. Customers will create subscriptions that are charged at a specific frequency which they will select at checkout. The frequency can be updated after checkout in the customer portal or merchant portal.

We advise that you keep the discount type and value the same as discounts tied to specific frequencies are not supported in the customer portal without customization.

Calendar selling plans are billed on specific days of the year that you will set in the calendar interface.

If you toggle "This calendar selling plan group should consider the selected billing policy" then you can also can also offer multiple frequencies just as you would standard selling plan.

When creating or editing the calendar, you will see a year field. The year will not effect future shipments of orders so you can set it to 1999 if you'd like. What is important is that the year stays the same for all calendar dates so as to avoid potential issues.

Cutoff Days are used when there are not frequency values selected for the calendar. They are used to prevent customers from being billed too quickly after their initial orders or reactivations or retries.

"Any subscriptions with orders (checkout or recurring) placed within the number of cutoff days before the next set calendar billing order date will have their orders set to the following calendar billing date."

Orders which bill on a calendar date are not affected by cutoff days and will bill the next calendar date if they do not have a frequency.

Prepaid Selling Plan Groups allow you to offer multiple orders of a product or variant for one flat fee upfront. These orders will be sent at whatever interval you specify.

The only additional field you need to add for prepaid selling plans is the Number of Shipments that the customer will receive upon initial purchase and renewal.

Prepaid pricing is automatically calculated by Shopify by subtracting the discount from the price of the product and multiplying by the number of orders. Shipping price will also be multiplied by the number of orders at checkout.

A Prepaid Calendar Selling Plan Group allows you to sell prepaid subscriptions which create orders on specific days of the year. These can have intervals or be set to bill on each day of the calendar without a specific interval just like regular Calendar Selling Plan Groups.

The final step of creating or editing a Selling Plan is the Selling Plan Group Labels.

Allows you to display price changes after the initial order in the Shopify Checkout

(MUST BE COMBINED WITH WORKFLOWS)

Enabling the First Order(s) Policy in a Selling Plan allows you to set the initial checkout price or discount for a subscription and display what the recurring price after your workflow triggers*.

When adding a Selling Plan to a Selling Plan group you can toggle "Enable First Order(s) Policy." When this is enabled, this will be the discount or price used by the product at checkout. The recurring policy will be displayed using the details set above.

The following examples will be using a product which is $20 in Shopify.

In this example, the First Order(s) Policy Policy is set to 50% for the first two orders and the Standard Orders policy is set to 25% off.

This will cause both policies to display in the checkout as so:

In order for this to work, you would create a workflow that would target this variant to swap the price to $15 (25% off) after the first two orders in conjunction with this selling plan in order to match the pricing policies display at checkout.

In this example, the First Order(s) Policy Policy is set to $2 off and the Standard Orders policy is set to $4 off after the checkout order.

This will cause both policies to display in the checkout as so:

In order for this to work, you would create a workflow that would target this variant to swap the price to $16 ($4 off) after the first order in conjunction with

this selling plan in order to match the pricing policies display at checkout.

Static price is different from a discount as it allows you to specify the specific price of a product at checkout on subscription. This value can be greater or less than the price of the product in Shopify.

In the this example, the First Order(s) Policy Policy has set the price of the product to $25 and the Standard Orders policy is set to $5 off after the checkout order.

This will cause both policies to display in the checkout as so:

In order for this to work, you would create a workflow that would target this variant to swap the price to $15 ($5 off) after the first order in conjunction with this selling plan in order to match the pricing policies display at checkout.

Static Price in the Recurring Policy can be used when swapping to a product that is more expensive OR you would like to specify the exact of the product being swapped to. This is particularly useful if all the products in the selling plan are different prices, but swap to the product at a specific price.

In the this example, the First Order(s) Policy Policy has set the price of the product to 10% off and the Standard Orders policy is set to a static price of $54 off after the checkout order. We can imagine that I might be swapping to a 3 pack which is why the price is increasing.

This will cause both policies to display in the checkout as so:

Workflow for this example: You would create a workflow that would target this variant to swap to the 3 pack product at $54.

In order to customize how this text displays in the checkout, you can navigate to your default theme content in Shopify.