Shopify Subscriptions

One of the main reasons why we switched over to Shopify was to get access to subscriptions for our customers. This app has been a huge dissapointment. It is so bad and we have almost considered not to offer subscriptions for our customers.
However we will try to find another subscription App.
- Customers can't amend their subscriptions, nor can we.
- We can't see future subscription orders, not even on the same day.
- When updating prices we have to go in on every single contract and change it manually.
Bad! Bad! Bad!

This app is a disappointing reflection of the current state of affairs at Shopify. Its rushed and careless release speaks volumes about the level of disregard the company has for its non–Shopify Plus merchants. It’s painfully clear that Shopify’s priorities lie almost exclusively with their high-paying enterprise clients, while the rest of us — small to mid-sized businesses — are treated as an afterthought.

The most glaring issue? Merchants cannot even manage their subscriptions through the app. This isn’t an obscure oversight — it’s a fundamental feature. And let’s be honest: the developers are fully aware of this. These are not amateurs; they know what they’re doing. The omission is deliberate, or at best, dismissive.

Will Shopify fix this? Highly unlikely. Why would they invest in improving a freebie app that doesn't generate revenue directly, especially when it's meant for the merchants they barely acknowledge? This app feels more like a checkbox on a roadmap than a genuinely useful tool.

At the end of the day, this situation reinforces what many of us have felt for a long time: unless you’re paying for Shopify Plus, you’re not worth their time. This app isn’t just broken — it’s a symptom of a broader issue of neglect and misplaced priorities.

The app is fine for shops with small inventories with prices that never change, nor ever run promotions.

For larger inventories.. let's just say Happy Clicking. You have to click each product individually to add it to a group. Why can't I just add collections?

Then, if you are running a short term promotion, when the customer creates the subscription, they keep the promotional price from thereon. If you put your prices up, the subscription price does not change. You have to go in and manually change each contract. I don't want to offer a fixed price to our customers. I am offering a service to make their lives easier so they don't have to visit us every month to place their orders. When our prices change, the subscription price should change. Fixed pricing would only be useful if I could set an expiry date.

There is literally no subscription management for customers, we have tried and tested a bunch of scenarios to get it to work and it never does. If we could give zero stars, we would.

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.