📇 How do I set up Subscription Programs?

A Subscription Program is the heart of the Smartrr app. Subscription Programs control which products are available for subscription purchase.

Last updated: March 26, 2024

What is a Subscription Program?

Subscription Plans, products, and variants are objects within a Subscription Program. You may set up one or multiple Subscription Plans per shop.

Two examples for the same store are provided below:

• Example 1: You would like to offer a discount for customers who elect to subscribe to your product vs. make a one-time purchase.
• Example 2: You would like to offer a variety-pack product with only a monthly subscription cadence, but the individual products within the product are available on both a bi-weekly and monthly cadence.

Both above examples are possible to execute within the same storefront by creating multiple Subscription Plans within a Subscription Program.

Creating a Subscription Program

Under Configuration in the left-hand menu, click on Subscription Programs. Click on the button Create program.

First, add all required information to your Subscription Program:

• Storefront label: Title of the Subscription Program on your product page, ex. “Subscribe & Save 10%”
• Storefront option label: Cadence text to display next to plan selector on your product page, ex. “Subscribe & Save 10%'', “Deliver every”, or “Frequency”. Onsite example:

• Admin label: Optional—if you would like your Subscription Program to have a different name in your Smartrr app

Next, add all required information for each Subscription Plan within your Subscription Program:

• Display: Label of the plan frequency selection on the product page, ex. “Every 2 Weeks”. You are able to add multiple selection options. Onsite example:
• Cart & Checkout label: Label displayed alongside the product once it’s been added to cart and on the checkout page, ex. “Delivered Every 2 Weeks”. Replace with a "{{H}} " to hide this label from customers.
• Category: Shopify requires a category to be assigned to each Subscription Program (selling plan). We recommend always leaving this set to "Subscription".
• Billing Schedule: Indicate the number of intervals between billings as a numerical value (ex. “2”) and the interval type (Days, Weeks, Months, or Years)
• Discount Incentive: Percentage or fixed amount discount that a customer receives with this Subscription Plan. You can also opt to change the discount percentage after a certain number of subscription orders.

For advanced subscriptions, the following options are available for merchants on Grow and Excel plans:

Advanced Subscription Program settings tabs

• Prepaid: If applicable, indicate the number of intervals between billings as a numerical value (ex. “2”) and the interval type will set automatically based on the interval type in the plan's Basic details tab.
• Max/Min: Used when you'd like a subscription to end after a certain number of billing cycles.
• Anchor: Used to set a day on which billing interval calculations should be made. Learn more about anchor dates and why you might use them here

Once all required information has been completed, click Save.

Warning: To ensure the best experience for your customers, we don’t recommend adding or deleting products or variants from a Subscription Program once it’s set up and active in your store. Only delete a product from a Subscription Program if there are no active subscriptions associated with the Subscription Program.

If you change a discount in a Subscription Plan, the discount will only go into effect for new subscriptions created. The discount will not be retroactively updated for existing discounts.

What are Portal Add-ons?

Portal add-ons are accessible by the customer via the Account Portal. Customers can add products to their subscription orders as one-time add ons at a discounted price.

To configure add-ons, navigate to Subscription Programs and then click on the Portal Add-ons tab.

Click on Browse to select one or multiple products/variants to be available to customers as add-ons.

Products that are selected here will be visible to your customers in their account here:

Note: At this time, it's not possible to add different add-ons per subscription program, or to offer different discounts per product in the add-ons section. To stay up-to-date with new features we release, you can follow our changelog.

Customers can click on an dd on image from within their account to view all images and read the product's description, which pulls from Shopify.

How can I add filters to add-ons?

If you are a shop with a large add-on offering, it might be helpful to add filters so your customers can easily find what they're looking for.

To setup a filter, go to product's page from within the Shopify Admin and create a new product tag including the Smartrr filter prefix SmartrrFilter: (ex. SmartrrFilter:Cookie). Smartrr will pick up on these tags for applicable add-on products and will automatically create filters to include within the Add-ons section.