What is a Selling Plan Group?
A selling plan group (also known as a “subscription group”) standardizes the functionality of your subscriptions through their billing schedules, subscription discounts, and product availability. You can create multiple selling plans within a selling plan group, but each plan within the group needs to be the same type.
Types of Selling Plan Groups:
Standard Selling Plan Group: This is fairly straight forward - standard selling plans operate as a standard subscription. Meaning, your customers will be charged on the billing date specific to their date of subscription as well as their frequency.
Calendar Selling Plan Group: This creates a defined billing date for all subscriptions for your store. You can set a cutoff date, meaning any subscriber that enrolls in a subscription program after the cutoff date, will be charged the following billing date.
Prepaid Selling Plan Group: Offer your customers the ability to checkout for multiple subscription orders, and pay upfront. For example, your customers can pay $100 upfront for 5 orders of a $20 subscription.
Selling Plan Group Definitions:
Setting up a SPG requires multiple pieces of information. Although the types of SPG's will cause differing required information, most of the definitions will remain consistent.
Products: Products are the goods on your site that you sell. Any product that is live in Shopify and in stock is eligible to be added to your Selling Plan Groups.
Variants: Variants represent a distinct variation of a product. In some cases, products may come in distinct sizes, colors, genders, etc. Each of these individual options are variants of a parent product. Much like products, variants are eligible to show in your SPG's as along as they are active within Shopify.
Selection Cart Label: The title of the subscription plan, which is typically the name of the delivery frequency and/or the value of the subscription discount.
Checkout/Cart Label: This label is displayed alongside the item in cart and on the checkout page (e.g. "Delivered every 2 months")
Discount Type: Subscriptions can have discounts applied by either a percentage or fixed value.
Storefront Label: The title of the subscription that will be shown to the customer on your product display page.
Storefront Option Label: shown on the product display page to identify the type of subscription, typically defined by the frequency.
Admin Label: This label allows you to identify the Selling Plan Group internally. This is not shown to the customer.
Admin Description: Description of the Admin Label, for internal tracking only. This description will not be shown to the customer.
Billing Schedule: You can set up your SPG Billing schedule by Days, or Weeks or Months.
Frequency: How often your products/variants are eligible to be subscribed to. For instance, if your Billing Schedule is set up my months, you can set Frequency options to 1,2,3... months etc.
Number of Shipments: When setting up a Prepaid Selling Plan, this value indicates how many subsequent shipments a customer will receive in total. For instance, if your prepaid plan was for 6-months and the frequency was monthly, the number of shipments would be 6.
How to Set up Selling Plan Groups
Standard Selling Plan Groups
The following steps outline how to set up the various types of Selling Plan Groups listed above.
Standard Selling Plan Group
Within the Settings section on the left hand panel, select Selling Plans and select “New Standard Selling Plan Group”.
*Standard Selling Plans will run indefinitely unless manually removed, while Calendar Selling Plan Groups run based on a selected billing date.
At the top of the page, add the products and/or product variants you want to apply to this particular Selling Plan Group.
Define your Selection Label, Checkout/Cart Label, Billing Schedule, Discount Type, and billing schedule. If your Selling Plan Group will allow for multiple frequencies, repeat accordingly
Set the Storefront Label, Storefront Option Label, Admin Label and Admin Description.
Click Submit at the top of the page and your Standard Selling Plan Group is live!
How to Set up Calendar Selling Plan Groups
Calendar Selling Plan Group
Within the Settings section on the left hand panel, select Selling Plans and select “New Calendar Selling Plan Group.”
Click Settings in your top navigation bar. Then click Selling Plans. To create a new Calendar Selling Plan Group, click Add New Calendar Selling Plan Group.
Similar to the process for setting up a Standard Selling Plan Group, select the products/variants you want to include in this SPG.
Define the Selection Label, Checkout/Cart Table, and Discount type & value
Set your billing schedule. This will differ from the regular selling plan group, as you'll need to select specific dates the subscription orders will go out.
Set the Storefront Label, Storefront Option Label, Admin Label and Admin Description and click submit.
How to Set up Prepaid Selling Plan Groups
Prepaid Selling Plan Groups
Within the Settings section on the left hand panel, select Selling Plans and select “New Prepaid Calendar Selling Plan Group.”
Similar to the process for setting up a Standard & Calendar Selling Plan Groups, select the products/variants you want to include in this SPG. Then determine what Discount Type and Value you want to enable for your SPG and the Shipping schedule.
Next choose the number of shipments the Prepaid Selling Plan will be for. For instance, if you are allowing customers to prepay for a 3-month subscription that Ships once a month, then you opt for 3 shipments. Customers would pay up front for all three shipments, and receive one a month, on the same date the initial shipment was sent. Shipments after the initial order will be billed at $0.
Next determine if you would like to Enable skipping of a single product in a multi-product subscription (if applicable) and if you'd like this subscription to renew. Prepaid Selling Plan Groups also allow you to take advantage of Stay.Ai's Gifting feature, which enables your customers to gift subscriptions to a loved one. More on that in our "Gifting" guide.
Finally, set the Storefront Label, Storefront Option Label, Admin Label and Admin Description and click Submit.