Offering Prepaid Subscriptions

Increase customer retention, and secure a steady and predictable cash flow with prepaid subscriptions.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create prepaid subscriptions that fit your needs and brand, and offer them on your store for an easy and flexible shopping experience.

How it works

Unlike standard, ongoing subscriptions, where customers pay per subscription order, with prepaid subscriptions, customers pay upfront for all their subscription orders for the duration of their prepaid subscription period.

In Yotpo Subscriptions, prepaid subscriptions are offered on your store separately from your ongoing subscriptions, with a separate, dedicated widget. This allows you to focus on selling and promoting your prepaid subscriptions, and also offers your shoppers an easy way to navigate your offers and make a purchase.

Before you start

To start offering prepaid subscriptions, you need to add at least one dedicated active product in Shopify that you’ll only offer as part of a prepaid subscription.

Adding a prepaid product in Shopify

To start offering prepaid subscriptions, you need to first add at least one dedicated product in Shopify. 

Each dedicated product you want to offer prepaid subscriptions on needs to meet the following conditions:

• Needs to be a new product: Add a new product, with a new SKU. Even if you’re offering the same product as a one-time purchase, or an ongoing, regular subscription, you’ll need to create a new product page for your prepaid product.
• Product price: It’s recommended that you set a price that reflects the price of your product multiplied by the delivery frequency and the prepaid duration.
  For example, if the price of a coffee bag you want to sell is $15, and you plan on offering it once a month for 3, 6, and 9 months, you need to set the price to $45. This is how much it would cost your customers to receive the product once a month for 3 months, without any additional discount. Then, you can offer additional prepaid and duration-based discounts when you set up your prepaid offer, so that your customers can see they’re getting a discount and are more likely to subscribe. For example, you’ll be able to offer a monthly prepaid 3-month subscription to your coffee bag at 10% off for $40.50, your monthly 6-month subscription at 15% off for $38.25, etc.
• Product title: To differentiate your product from one-time purchases, we recommend giving your product a title that indicates it’s part of a prepaid subscription. For example: Coffee Club, Prepaid Coffee Subscription, etc.

For all other product settings, see the Shopify help center on adding and updating products.

Creating a prepaid subscription plan

Once you’ve created your dedicated prepaid products in Shopify, you can create your prepaid plan in Yotpo Subscriptions for one or more prepaid products.

To create a prepaid subscription plan: 

1. From your Yotpo Subscriptions main menu, go to Plans.
2. Click + New plan.
3. Select the Prepaid subscription plan option and click Next. 
4. Under Products, click + Add products and select the dedicated products you’ve added in Shopify.
   
   Please note:

   You should only include products that you want to apply the same settings to. Products in a prepaid plan will include the same delivery frequency, prepaid durations, discounts, etc. If you wish to sell a product according to different terms, create a separate prepaid plan for that product.
5. Under Prepaid options, set the delivery frequency, prepaid durations, and discounts that you want to offer on the products you’ve added to this plan. You can add or remove prepaid durations as needed.
   
   Important:

   Prepaid durations need to work logically with the delivery frequency you choose to allow for a logical number of deliveries. To do that, make sure you follow these conditions.
   
   

   • Prepaid durations must be equal or greater than your delivery frequency

   For example, if your delivery frequency is every 1 month, your prepaid duration cannot be 2 weeks which wouldn’t allow for a single delivery. In this case, your prepaid duration needs to at least be 1 month.
   
   

   • Prepaid durations need to be divisible by your delivery frequency

   For example, if your delivery frequency is every 2 weeks, your prepaid durations cannot be 3 or 5 weeks. In this case, your prepaid duration can be 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.

6. Under Delivery schedule, you can decide if you want orders to be processed on the date of purchase of each subscription, or if you want all your orders to be processed on a specific date (“anchor dates”).
7. Under Renewal period, set how many times you want the prepaid period to renew. You can set it to automatically renew, or expire after a set number of charges.
8. Under Plan name, give your prepaid subscription plan an internal name to help you identify it in your plans list. This name will not be visible to customers.
9. Click Save & Launch at the top of the page, and then confirm that you want your new plan to go live on your store. 

Learn more about additional plan settings that apply to all plans, and how to view, edit, or remove plans once you’ve created them.

Customizing your prepaid widget

For a consistent experience, we’ll automatically apply the look & feel of your regular product page widget layout and appearance to your prepaid widget.

However, the text that appears to shoppers in the prepaid widget is not the same as the text in your product page widget. This includes the header, the purchasing options, and the policy text that appears at the bottom of the widget.

Here’s a quick comparison of both widgets:

To customize the look & feel of your widgets, see the subscriptions store view appearance article. If you want to customize the texts that will appear in your prepaid widget, contact us via live chat from Yotpo Subscriptions, and we’ll be happy to help.

FAQs