How to Set Up Subscriptions on Shopify: A Step-by-Step Guide (2026)

Most Shopify merchants who want to add subscriptions spend more time second-guessing the setup than actually doing it. The process is straightforward — but only once you know the sequence. Get it out of order and you end up with plans that aren't connected to products, or a checkout that doesn't surface the subscription option at all.

This guide covers exactly how to set up subscriptions on Shopify from scratch: which app to use, how to build your plans, how to configure the customer portal, and what to check before your first subscriber ever sees it.

What You Need Before You Start

Shopify doesn't offer built-in subscription management in the merchant dashboard. Subscriptions on Shopify are powered by the Subscriptions API, which third-party apps (and Shopify's own app) connect to. This means your first step is always choosing an app — not configuring something inside Shopify itself.

Before you install anything, have these ready:

• The products you want to offer on subscription. You don't need to offer your entire catalog. Start with your top one or two sellers and expand from there.
• Your pricing strategy. Will subscribers pay the same as one-time buyers, or get a discount? A 10–15% discount is the most common offer and converts well without compressing margins significantly.
• Your delivery frequency. Monthly is the default for most merchants. Weekly works for consumables. Every two months works for higher-priced items. You can offer multiple options and let subscribers choose.

Having these decisions made before you open the app saves significant time during setup.

Step 1: Choose and Install Your Subscription App

The subscription app you choose determines everything downstream — how your plans look at checkout, what your customer portal can do, and how well your payment recovery works.

The most important things to check when evaluating apps:

• Zero transaction fees. Some apps charge a percentage of every subscription order on top of Shopify's own fees. That adds up fast. Look for apps that charge a flat monthly rate or nothing at all.
• A subscriber self-serve portal. Subscribers need to be able to skip, pause, swap products, and update their payment method without contacting you. Apps that don't include this will flood your support inbox.
• Payment recovery. Failed payments are inevitable. The app needs a real dunning sequence — multiple retries over 7–8 days, plus proactive expiring card alerts — not just one or two retry attempts.

Ongoing Subscriptions+ Bundles covers all three — no transaction fees, a full self-serve portal, and an 8-day payment recovery sequence with proactive card expiry alerts. It's free to install.

To install: go to the Shopify App Store, find your chosen app, click Add app, and follow the OAuth prompts. The app will connect to your store and request access to your products and billing. Approve it and you'll land in the app dashboard.

Step 2: Build Your Subscription Plans

A subscription plan defines the terms: how often the order ships, whether there's a discount, and how the option is labeled at checkout. Most apps let you create multiple plans per product so subscribers can choose their own frequency.

Inside the app, navigate to Selling Plans or Subscription Plans (the exact label varies by app) and create your first plan.

For each plan, you'll set:

Frequency and interval. Choose the delivery cadence — daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom number of days. If you're offering multiple options, create a separate plan for each and group them together.

Discount. Enter the percentage or fixed amount off the standard price. A tiered approach works well: 10% for monthly, 15% for every-other-month. Some merchants offer no discount at all and instead compete on the convenience of auto-delivery — both approaches work depending on the category.

Display name. This is what appears in the checkout widget. "Subscribe & Save 10%" is clear. "Monthly Subscription Plan v2" is not. Write it the way a customer would say it.

Once your plans are created, you'll assign them to specific products in the next step.

Step 3: Assign Plans to Products

Creating a plan doesn't automatically apply it to any products — you need to link them. This is done inside the subscription app, not inside Shopify's product editor.

Navigate to Products inside the app. Select a product and assign the selling plans you created. You can assign multiple plans to the same product (so a subscriber can choose monthly or bi-monthly, for example). You can also assign the same plan to multiple products at once — useful if you're setting up subscriptions across a whole category.

Once assigned, the product's Shopify listing will show the subscription widget at checkout automatically. No theme editing required for most modern Shopify themes.

One thing to check: if your theme is more than a couple of years old, the subscription widget may not appear automatically. In that case, the app's support documentation will have a theme integration snippet you can add manually, or you can reach out to the app's support team.

For a deeper look at how subscription plans connect to product management in Shopify, see our guide on Shopify Subscription Management.

Step 4: Set Up Subscription Bundles

Subscription bundles let your customers curate their own recurring order from a selection of products you choose. Instead of subscribing to a single fixed item, a subscriber can pick two, three, or five products from your catalog and receive their custom selection on autopilot every month.

Bundles are one of the highest-impact features you can add to a subscription program. They increase average order value because subscribers fill their bundle with more than they'd buy in a single product subscription. They reduce churn because the experience feels personal — a subscriber who built their own box is more invested in keeping it. And they drive product discovery: a subscriber who picks three items this month might swap in something new next month rather than canceling.

Ongoing Subscriptions+ Bundles includes bundle functionality out of the box — no extra app or cost needed.

To set up a bundle inside the app:

Create the bundle. Navigate to Bundles in the app dashboard and create a new bundle. Give it a name that describes what subscribers are building — "Build Your Monthly Box," "Pick Your Flavors," or something specific to your brand.

Choose which products go in. Select the products subscribers can pick from. You can include your full catalog or limit it to specific collections. Most merchants use bundles to surface their bestsellers alongside newer products subscribers might not have discovered yet.

Set the selection rules. Define how many items subscribers must include — a minimum of two, a maximum of five, or a fixed number. This controls the order size and makes the bundle feel intentional rather than unlimited.

Set the pricing. You can offer bundles at a flat price, apply a percentage discount based on the total retail value, or price each slot individually. A simple approach: 10% off the combined retail price of whatever the subscriber selects.

Customize the widget. Ongoing lets you adjust how the bundle selector looks on your product page — the layout, the image display, the selection counter. It takes a few minutes and makes a significant difference in how polished the experience feels.

Once the bundle is live, it appears as a product on your storefront. Subscribers shop it like any other product, build their selection at checkout, and their chosen items ship on the subscription cadence you set.

Step 5: Set Up the Customer Portal

The subscriber portal is where your customers manage their own subscriptions after checkout — skipping a delivery, swapping a product, changing their address, pausing, or canceling. A good portal eliminates the most common support requests entirely.

Inside the app, find the Portal or Customer Portal settings. You'll configure:

• What actions subscribers can take. At minimum, enable address updates, payment method updates, skip, and pause. Cancellation is worth enabling too — subscribers who can cancel themselves are less likely to dispute charges.
• Swap options. If you sell multiple flavors or variants, let subscribers swap between them. This is one of the highest-impact retention features available — a subscriber who can switch flavors doesn't need to cancel.
• Branding. Most apps let you set a logo, brand color, and button style so the portal matches your store. It takes two minutes and makes the experience feel native.

The portal is accessed via a link sent in your subscription confirmation and order emails. Make sure those emails are set up and going out — most apps handle this automatically, but check your email notification settings to confirm.

Payment Recovery Runs Automatically

Failed payments are a normal part of running a subscription business — cards expire, banks block auto-charges, and billing dates sometimes land at bad moments. With most apps, the default behavior is to retry once or twice and then cancel the subscription. That recovers roughly 20% of failed payments.

Ongoing Subscriptions handles this automatically from the moment you install. There's nothing to configure. The built-in recovery sequence retries failed charges across 7–8 days, sends subscribers notifications with the specific decline reason (not a generic "payment failed"), and includes one-click links to update their payment method without logging in. Proactive expiring card alerts go out before billing day — catching failures before they happen.

That combination recovers 60–70% of failed payments, compared to 20% for apps with basic retry logic. It runs in the background on every subscriber, every billing cycle, without any action from you.

If you want to understand how the recovery mechanics work in detail, What Is Dunning Management? has the full breakdown.

Customize Your Email Notifications

Ongoing Subscriptions sends a set of transactional emails to your subscribers automatically — no configuration required to get them going. Order confirmation, upcoming shipment reminder, payment failed notice, subscription paused confirmation — all of it goes out on the right triggers without you setting anything up.

What most merchants don't realize is that these are among the highest-opened emails in their business. Subscribers are actively waiting for them. "Your next order ships in 3 days" gets opened because the subscriber wants to know. That makes subscription transactional emails a meaningful brand touchpoint — and worth the ten minutes it takes to make them yours.

In the app, go to Email Notifications or Notifications in the settings. You'll see each email type listed. For each one, you can edit:

From name and subject line. Make sure the from name is your store name, not a generic default. The subject line should match your brand's tone — if you're a playful skincare brand, "Your box ships soon 🌿" lands differently than "Upcoming Subscription Order."

Body copy. The default copy is functional. Customizing it — even slightly — makes the email feel like it came from your brand rather than a generic app. Add a personal note, reference the product by name, or include a quick tip about the item they're receiving.

Branding. Set your logo, brand color, and button style so the email matches your storefront. Ongoing applies your branding across all notification emails from one settings panel — you don't have to update each template separately.

The portal link. Every notification email includes a link to the subscriber portal. Make sure the button label is clear — "Manage your subscription" or "Skip this order" depending on the email type. This one link is responsible for the majority of self-serve actions your subscribers take, so it should be obvious.

The emails worth customizing first are the upcoming order reminder and the payment failed notice. The upcoming order email is your highest-open email and a natural moment for subscribers to make changes. The payment failed email needs to be clear and action-oriented — a subscriber who knows exactly what to do recovers their subscription far more often than one who receives a vague error message.

Step 6: Test Before You Go Live

Before any real subscriber sees your checkout, run through it yourself.

Most subscription apps include a test mode or let you create a test order using Shopify's Bogus Gateway. Go to Settings → Payments in Shopify, switch to the Bogus Gateway temporarily, and place a test subscription order on your storefront.

Check each of the following:

• The subscription widget appears on the product page and at checkout
• The correct plan (frequency, discount) is applied to the order
• You receive the subscription confirmation email
• The subscriber portal link in the email works and loads correctly
• Inside the portal, you can skip, pause, and update payment method without errors

Then switch your payment gateway back and do one final check: verify the subscription appears in the app dashboard and that the next billing date is set correctly.

This takes 15 minutes and catches the majority of configuration issues before a real customer encounters them.

What to Watch After You Go Live

Once your first subscribers start coming in, the three numbers worth tracking in the first 30 days:

Activation rate. What percentage of people who see the subscription option at checkout actually choose it? If it's under 10%, test a larger discount or a different plan label. If it's over 30%, you're doing well.

Payment failure rate. Check this after your first billing cycle. A 5–8% failure rate is normal. Higher than that, and it's worth reviewing your customer communication and retry sequence.

Cancellation reasons. Most apps log why subscribers cancel. The top reason tells you whether you have a pricing problem, a product problem, or a portal problem.

For a deeper look at the metrics that matter, see Shopify Subscription Analytics: The Metrics That Actually Matter.

Ready to Add Subscriptions to Your Shopify Store?

Setting up subscriptions on Shopify is a single afternoon of work. The sequence matters — choose your app, build your plans, assign them to products, set up the portal, configure payment recovery, and test — and you'll have a working subscription system before the day is out.

Ongoing Subscriptions+ Bundles is free to install, charges zero transaction fees, and includes everything covered in this guide — subscriber portal, 8-day payment recovery, prepaid options, and bundles. Trusted by 10,000+ Shopify brands who've generated over $600M in recurring revenue.

Published by Ongoing Apps