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.

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.

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

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.