Shopify Subscriptions

Shopify Subscriptions: A Major Step Backward for Business Users

Shopify's subscription offering reveals a concerning lack of understanding of subscription management needs. After migrating over 2,000 subscriptions from our previous platform, we've encountered severe limitations that make this solution untenable for serious subscription businesses.

The most egregious oversight is the complete absence of read-only API access to subscription data. Shopify's justification that this information is "too sensitive" for API access contradicts industry standards and their own practice of providing the same data via CSV download. This restriction severely hampers any business's ability to build robust reporting or integration systems. They want you to become a "Partner" and develop your own solution, vs Admin API endpoints.

The data accessibility issues compound further:
- The provided CSV exports only capture current state data, omitting crucial historical information like creation dates
- There's no way to link orders with their corresponding subscriptions
- The analytics suite lacks fundamental subscription metrics (expansion, contraction, churn, new subscriptions)

The migration process itself is poorly implemented. While Shopify provides an import template, the system offers no meaningful error reporting or validation. Failed imports generate sporadic email notifications without actionable details, leaving teams to guess at composite key issues and other potential problems.

After three weeks of migration efforts, multiple support tickets, and account representative meetings, it's clear Shopify has no serious intention of addressing these limitations. Their dismissive attitude toward feature requests suggests these problems won't be resolved anytime soon. The lack of API access to our own subscription data has proven to be a critical dealbreaker.

For any business managing more than a handful of subscriptions or requiring proper analytics, I strongly advise looking elsewhere. This product appears designed for app normies with no reporting needs, falling far short of business requirements.

only works with new account setup, where users dont have passwords, instead a code is sent to their email every time. not to be funny, but not every customer wants to have to access their emails just to log in or shop. going to have to look for alternative subscription options and found lots of issues with it too, sadly.

Application doesn't work. I created a plan, but tests didn't work well and clients couldn't use the application correctly as well...so basicly instead of buying a subscription, they ordered a single order.

Doesn't work for products that are only subscription - i.e. a one time purchase is not an option. The documentation says it does this, but when you set it up as documented customers get a "Variant can only be purchased with a selling plan" error message and can not buy.

Needs to serious improvements.
1. If payment failed and customer updates their credit card there is no way customer can trigger and approve the payment again, they are left contacting us, we then cancel the subscription and then tell them to make a new one on the site.
2. Customer cant change or move the date, eg if they order every 6 weeks and want it to trigger at 5 weeks and reset the schedule from 6 weeks from manual payment they cant do it.

Do everyone a favor take this app down and rebuild it, it is not fit to be put on the shopify app store and is concerning it is allowed to be downloaded by its customers.

it does not work in india.

Customer said they want to cancel their subscription, when I looked in my subscription app it shows I have 0 contracts. All this time I thought nobody wanted to subscribe. I wonder how many people think they have a subscription to my products but instead this app is not working and making me look like an idiot and more importantly losing long term customers. This makes my business look incompetent. This should be seamless seeing as Shopify's baseline business model is subscriptions.

Too many glitches. Works sometimes. Needs serious improvements.

1. If payment failed and customer updates their credit card there is no way customer can trigger and approve the payment again, they are left contacting us, we then cancel the subscription and then tell them to make a new one on the site. *Note, Shopify support is not equipped to handles these issues, we just go around in circles since they don't understand their own products.

2. When customer payment fails, no reason is given to us merchants, so we have no explanation for the customer.

3. Customer cant change or move the date, eg if they order every 6 weeks and want it to trigger at 5 weeks and reset the schedule from 6 weeks from manual payment they cant do it.

Please work on fixing these issues, otherwise, I am forced to abandoned the Shopify Subscriptions App.

Added this app. The options are showing twice on my product page. 1st in the normal space. 2nd showing after the footer. Tried to get support. Shopify told me to speak to the app support? Its just brings me back to shopify support.

Who can give us support for this app that does not work.