How do you create a Shopify subscription for a customer?

When would you set up a subscription for a customer?

Not every subscription starts in your storefront. A regular calls and asks for her coffee every month. Someone who bought once emails to say they’d like the same order regularly. Sending each of them a link to your shop and hoping they finish checkout loses some of them.

With Zubs, your team sets the subscription up for them in the Zubs admin. You choose the subscription plan and delivery interval, the products, the delivery address and the shipping rate, and the plan’s discount applies as usual.

How does the customer agree to it?

A subscription you create starts only once the customer confirms it by email. They get a link to a page that shows the whole subscription: products and prices, delivery interval, address, shipping and the payment method that will be charged. They confirm it there or decline it.

The link is valid for 7 days. If the customer confirms, the subscription becomes active and bills like one started in your store. If they decline or don’t answer, no subscription is created and they are never charged. Your team does the typing, and the customer still gives explicit consent before money moves. That protects both sides from a misheard order on the phone. It also gives the subscription a better start. Many early cancellations come from a first order that wasn’t what the customer expected, and a customer who has seen every detail before paying gets no such surprise.

While you wait, Zubs shows which subscriptions are still pending, so nobody has to chase the customer from memory. The first order of a confirmed subscription is marked in Shopify, so you can see how many subscriptions your team brings in.

What else can your team do for a customer?

The same admin covers the other requests support gets. You can ship the next delivery now, or invoice a customer for an extra delivery without touching their schedule. You can bill a delivery they skipped and then wanted after all, and pause or cancel several subscriptions at once. Failed payments have their own tools, described under dunning.

How does it fit with the rest of Zubs?

Once confirmed, the subscription is an ordinary Zubs subscription. The customer manages it in the customer portal, it follows the rules of its plan, and failed payments go through the same retries as every other subscription.

Set it up in the help center: creating and managing subscriptions.

Who is it for?

Shops that take orders by phone or email, or whose support team often turns a conversation into a subscription. It also suits customers who would rather be set up than go through checkout themselves.