How to create a gift subscriptions

Do you want to create a subscription plan that expires automatically after a certain amount of time?

Ongoing lets you create subscription plans that expire after a certain amount of billing cycles.

The customer is still allowed to cancel at anytime during that period.

Usage

• Create a gift subscriptions so people can buy a product for someone else

• Create a subscription plan that ends after a certain amount of time

• Let's customers opt out any time, within the time frame

Benefits

• Broaden your subscription product offerings with gift subscription products

• Automatically stops recurring charges after a specified period of time

• Give customer flexibility to pause or cancel their subscription

• Earn more money with prepaid gift subscriptions

✅ You can create a new product on Shopify just for gift subscriptions, if you want.

⭐️ RECOMMENDED: Prepaid Gift Subscription Example

Sally wants to offer a 3 month gift subscription (Prepaid).

The plan will end after 3 months.

Delivery is monthly & billing will be 3 months paid upfront.

Delivery every 1 month, & Billing every 3 months.

Sally sets up a subscription plan, and clicks Show Advanced.

She checks the box "This plan should expire automatically".

In this example, it will expire after 1 billing cycle.

1 billing cycle is 3 months, so we want it to end after 1 billing cycle.

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Pay Per Delivery Gift Subscription Example

Sally wants to offer a 3 month gift subscription (Pay Per Delivery).

The plan will end after 3 months.
The customer can cancel or pause their subscription within the first 3 months.

Delivery & billing will both be monthly.

Delivery every 1 month, & Billing every 1 month.

Sally sets up a subscription plan, and clicks Show Advanced.

She checks the box "This plan should expire automatically".

In this example, it will expire after 3 billing cycle.

Since customer is billed monthly and she wants it to end after 3 months, that would be 3 billing cycles.

Having issues or seeing errors?

If you are seeing an error message when you try to add a gift subscription plan, this means you are creating duplicate plans.

For example, you can't have a 3 month subscription plan and a 3 month gift subscription plan in the same subscription group.

✅ How to Fix: Create a new subscription group just for the gift subscription plans.

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HOW IT WORKS

For gift subscriptions, the person buying the product (the sender) will enter the recipient's shipping address on the Shopify checkout.

On the Shopify checkout screen, the sender will add their information for the email & credit card sections.

The sender gets access to the Subscriber Portal so they can make adjustments as needed.

And the Recipient just receives the packages in the mail regularly until the gift subscription ends & then the packages will stop. :)

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Read our blog article "Ongoing Launches Gift Subscriptions" here.