Shopify Subscriptions

It's just about OK. We had (and continue to have) glitches moving across from Recharge (that got expensive). Really basic subscription stuff like a customer wanting to postpone an order by a few days just doesn't look possible. Even the support help couldn't do it. Having significant doubts about this after a time-consuming migration. Be careful of this app - if you need anything above a super-basic sub, it's unlikely to be what you want...

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.

A bit limited at this time. We were hoping we could do a limited time subscription (for example: a 12 mo. plan), but that is not possible. We also were desiring to send a different product or product bundle each of those months, but you are limited to the same item(s) every month.

Thanks

At first this app seemed great, but half the time there are glitches when I There is no way to see data about how many people have their subscriptions active (total) for fulfillment & no way to make all the subscriptions charge on the same day every month. You cannot edit the dates at all.

This app could be really great, but it seems it was rushed and a lot of basic functions are missing or glitchy.

Minimal ability to edit the text, leading to confusion over terms. Specifically, the bottom text about cancel/pause/renew -- very handy, agree with it entirely on principle, I wanted to (but could not) edit the text to point out that this is for the subscription purchase and not the one-off. The formatting left it a bit vague.

Colors do not pull dynamically from BRAND, which feels an odd and uncomfortable choice to leave off.

Unsure when subscriptions bill -- the first of the month? The day customers sign up? This is not a setting nor was easy to find out when installing the app.

Options were unclear. I can add an option to send weekly or monthly or annually, I assume that's how often to customer gets charged? Would request clarification on wording in the dashboard so I can offer better thoughts. At first I took it as "oh, customer can be charged for 3 months, and then I'll mail... once... a month... no that's not right..."

While installed, there was a conflict where the subscription app was duplicating in my footer. This is not a mark-off of the app, may be a theme issue, but mentioning it for dev exploration.

The checklist in the backend upon install did not check off steps as I was going through them, which lead to considerable worry and time spent over exploration: "Am I doing this right, is something not clicking, what is happening."

Overall, the idea is GREAT as a starter. The execution needs review, the backend communication needs review.

Will keep an eye on app to see if work continues.

This probably has potential - but has serious limitations if you sell physical product. The biggest gap is that it will not allow the customer to select their shipping method at checkout - it just auto-selects the cheapest one and does not present any others.

Additionally it does not work with manual payment methods - does not allow your customer to pay by ACH, wire, etc..

It seems as if this was only created with low cost digital products in mind.

Easy to set up, but lacks basic functions. You can't set a minimum for how long a customer has to subscribe which is silly to me because people can just take advantage of the discount, then unsubscribe right away.

I was very excited to see this app, however I found that it's not usable for websites that sell digital products. This, because the copy 'Delivers every ...' cannot be changed into something more meaningful (like 'renews every...'), especially for the non-EN market. Hopefully this will change in future and I will reconsider using this app.

Nice, that Shopify makes an own Subscription app which is free, but unfortunately it only works with "new customer accounts" which is pretty bad when you don't want to use these (because of bad brand experience and no design control).