Shopify Subscriptions

You can't even add subscriptions to your products in bulk....embarrassing product to have, it would be better if they just remove it altogether and make you go through a third party.

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.

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.

Don't waste your time trying to get this app to work!! Nothing about it work as described, customer support could not help at all. We deleted this app and moved on.

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.

Cant even do free shipping as a subscription option.
Management of it suck both for users and merchant.
Stay away.

The app is nice but at the bottom by the footer there is the subsciption options that just wont go away, too hard to setup i guess ill have to PAY for this FREE feature somewhere else. Wasted my entire day on this

Um, it works. Not a lot of customization, options for customers (like change billing/shipping date, add more products, etc) and lacking on analytics and retention capabilities. Best part is - it's free. If you are just getting started its a good app. We've been using it for about 6 months now and probably to the point of needing a more robust app that has more flexibility and features.

The app is functional and you can't beat the cost...but it leaves a lot to be desired from a subscription app, a few of the issues we've run into:

-customers can't edit their subscriptions, so people have to cancel and resubscribe if they ever want to add items, or edit quantities - even if people wanted to 'shift' their subscription delay it by less time than skipping a whole shipment (they can only skip/pause/cancel and update billing info)

-when recurring orders are generated, they commit the needed inventory, but when the order then goes through the process and gets fulfilled the committed inventory is stuck as committed and requires a lengthy support ticket to resolve - this is happening with every SKU variant on every subscription order so it very quickly becomes a phantom inventory commitment problem

-There's no forecasting or upcoming order view, even if you export the contracts it exports in Shopify's variant ID (not our SKU#s or UPCs that we would need to cross reference for forecasting purposes)

-There's no way to contact the current subscribers or a given item with a message or new item (i.e. one item is being discontinued and replaced with a like item that they'd likely want to subscribe to)

-There's no setting/way to apply price change logic, if you have prices change, your current subscriptions are stuck at the old price unless you manually change each individual one (I understand how this might be a desired behavior, but that should at least be a setting or option "use current price" or "use original price")

-The app auto-tags orders which is handy, but we have no control over what the tags are, the logic applied, or anything....it's stuck with what the developer set (and you can't even see/change it, you just have to guess based on observed behavior)

Those are just a few of the pain points to managing it as we grow (for context we've been using this app since its 'early access' days and have several hundred active subscription contracts). But again....you can't beat the price.

It's a very basic plug-in subscription app – you get what you pay for. We have quite a few frustrations with it from the back-end, and it's not user-friendly for customers to use on the front-end either. So do your research before you commit, as you may be better paying for a subscription service with more bells and whistles.