Part 4. Higher plans
12 Sell subscriptions, and make existing ones longer
Turn a one-off buyer into a subscriber in one tap, and offer an existing subscriber a longer commitment without creating a second contract.
Two different things live in this chapter, and only the second one needs a paid connection.
Selling a subscription after checkout
Any offer can carry a selling plan instead of a plain price. The buyer taps once and leaves as a subscriber rather than as a one-off customer. This works on every plan, exactly like variants or quantity tiers.
It is the highest-value thing this app can do for a store that sells consumables, because you are not adding one sale, you are adding a stream of them.
Two practical points. Say the terms plainly in the offer text, because a subscription accepted by surprise becomes a refund and a bad review. And if you sell a fixed-length subscription, three months for example, set the length on the offer so the contract actually carries it.
- The selling plan selected, the length field visible
- The shipping fields in the same frame
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Making an existing subscription longer
The second feature is for buyers who are already subscribed. On the thank-you page you can offer them a better deal in exchange for a longer commitment: three months becomes six, or a monthly plan becomes quarterly.
This changes the contract they already have. No second subscription, nothing for them to cancel, and their next billing date does not move.
This one needs the Scale plan and a connection to your subscription app. Shopify does not let one app modify a contract created by another, so the upgrade goes through your subscription app's own API. We support Recharge today. You paste an API key on the subscription page in the app, and it is stored encrypted.
Two things the app refuses to do
It will not make a subscription shorter. If the buyer’s current commitment is longer than what your rule offers, the offer is withheld rather than served as an improvement it is not.
It will not claim success it cannot verify. After the change, the app reads the contract back and confirms the values really moved. An upgrade that returns a cheerful response without changing anything is treated as a failure, because that is what it is.
One thing to know before you build this rule. A buyer who is already subscribed usually does not see the one-click page when your offer carries a selling plan, so they land in the group who never saw it. Aim your upgrade rule at that audience, not at the buyers who saw the page.
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