How subscriptions work on Shopify: plan, widget, app, customer

Published October 10, 2026

This page is about selling products to your customers on a recurring basis. It is not about Shopify's own pricing plans. Shopify's Help Center keeps the two apart: the subscription app manages recurring sales of your products; the pricing plans define which Shopify features your store has access to. If you were looking for what Shopify charges you, this is the wrong page.

Selling by subscription on Shopify involves four parts that are easy to mix up: the plan attached to a product, the widget on the product page, the app that bills, and what the customer sees and can do. This page takes them one at a time. Every fact comes from Shopify's documentation, listed at the end and read on October 6, 2026. Some of those pages are written for app developers; where they are, this page says so and puts their terms in plain words.

The short version

When a customer buys a subscription, Shopify takes the first payment and creates the first order. It then records the agreement between you and that customer (Shopify's term: a subscription contract) and logs the first charge against it.

Every later charge is the app's job. Shopify's own summary: "Subsequent customer orders are automated by the app." At each renewal the app asks Shopify to charge the saved payment method, and Shopify creates a new order.

So Shopify holds the data and takes the payments. The app decides when to bill, labels the offer as a subscription on your store, and gives you and your customer the screens to manage it. The rest of this page unpacks each part.

1. The plan: what "subscription" means for one product

A subscription plan is the offer attached to a product: how often the customer is billed, how often they are delivered, and at what price. Shopify's technical name for it is a selling plan; its own example is a product "billed and delivered on a monthly basis at a 15% discount".

Two shapes exist. Pay per delivery, which Shopify also calls "Subscribe and save": the customer pays each time an order ships. Prepaid: the customer pays once, up front, and receives the deliveries over the period covered.

A plan sets three things:

Billing frequency: how often the customer is charged. Every week, every three months.
Delivery frequency: how often an order is created and shipped. Every month, every other week.
Price: a discount in money or in percent. It can hold for the whole life of the subscription, or for a set number of cycles, after which another price applies.

Billing and delivery do not have to match. Shopify's example is a plan group called "Subscribe & Save" where the customer chooses the delivery frequency and the billing frequency separately.

Plans live in groups, and a group is attached to products or variants. Each plan in a group is one more way to buy the product. A product can carry several optional plans, or a single required one: Shopify calls these "subscription-only" offers.

In your admin, all of this shows on the product itself. When a product or one of its variants has a subscription, its details appear in the Purchase options section of the product page. The same section holds one checkbox that decides whether the product is sold only by subscription, or as a one-off purchase as well. A subscription-only product can be sold on the Online store channel only.

In the free Shopify Subscriptions app, a plan has a title, which your customers see on the product listing page of your online store, an internal description, a delivery frequency and interval (weekly, monthly or yearly), and optional discounts. You create it from Apps > Subscriptions > Plans, or from the product page's Purchase options section. A third-party app has its own plan screen; the plan still lands in the same Purchase options section.

One detail matters later. Changing a plan changes what new customers buy, not what existing subscribers already agreed to. Shopify's wording: "Updating the original plan doesn't modify pre-existing subscription contracts."

2. The widget: what the product page shows

A plan puts nothing on your storefront by itself. You add a block to your product page, and, in the free app's words, "Subscription details display on the product, cart, and thank you pages."

The block is added in the theme editor. For the free app: go to Online Store, click Edit theme on the theme you use, open a product template, then under Product information click Add block and choose Subscription widget. Save.

For a third-party app, the block is the one that app provides, chosen from the same Add block list, under Apps. These app blocks are placed, moved and removed from the theme editor, and they only work on themes built for them.

Compatibility is the first thing to check. Your theme must support sections and blocks. Shopify's list: its own Online Store 2.0 themes, the Horizon family of themes, and two older themes, Debut from version 15.0 and Brooklyn from version 17.0. On those two older themes, the free app's widget needs one line added by hand to the product template, plus a switch turned on under App embeds.

A second check, on themes with blocks: the free app asks that the Subscription widget under App embeds be switched off, so the widget shows up once and in the right place.

What the widget contains

Shopify publishes design guidelines that subscription apps are asked to follow. They describe the product form in four parts: the price, the choice of plan, the plan details, and the button.

On the choice of plan, two lines are worth reading on your own product page. First, when a product can also be bought once, that one-off option should be shown (the guidelines call it a "one-time subscription"). Second, on the order of the options: "On the first page load, select the one-time subscription by default."

So, in Shopify's reference design, the option selected when the page opens is the one-off purchase, and the customer moves to the subscription. Whether the widget installed on your store does the same is something to look at on your own product page. How to see it in one capture, and what each state does, is the subject of a separate guide (a French-language guide).

On the words: the plan group name should always be visible, option names should never be hidden, and the button label should change for a subscription, to "Add subscription to cart". Savings written in the options should be percentages, not amounts, because an amount stops being right when the currency changes.

On prices that change over time: say how many payments are made at the current price, and what the price becomes afterwards. Shopify's example: first payment $6.00, then $9.00.

The plan name follows the customer: the same text appears in the cart, at checkout and in past orders. Shopify's guidelines add: "The selling plan name shouldn't be an additional opportunity to write marketing text."

3. The app: what it does, what Shopify does

You need one. Shopify's setup page starts with the app: before anything in the admin, you follow the setup steps of the subscription app you chose from the Shopify App Store, the free Shopify Subscriptions app or a third-party one. The only other route Shopify names is a custom build by a developer.

Shopify draws the line between itself and the app in a table, in a page written for developers. In plain words: Shopify stores the subscription data and takes the payments, the first one and every renewal. The app labels the offer as a subscription on your store, schedules the charges and handles the ones that fail, and provides the screens where you and your customer manage the subscription.

In practice this means three things.

The agreement is Shopify's, the schedule is the app's. After checkout, Shopify records the agreement with the customer and hands it to the app. That agreement is not the order: the order is what gets created each time a payment goes through. At each renewal the app asks Shopify to charge the customer (Shopify's term: a billing attempt), and a new order appears. With the free app, that charge runs the day after the subscription is due, at 10:00 am in your store's local time.

The payment method is held by Shopify. The customer's card is stored by Shopify, and you cannot see the full card details once they have been entered. At renewal, the app asks Shopify to charge it.

Uninstalling has a clock. From the developer documentation: "48 hours after a user uninstalls a subscription app, any subscription contracts that are owned by that app and that haven't been terminated are cancelled." That covers active, paused and failed subscriptions alike. The Help Center adds that the data you created inside a third-party app is deleted 48 hours after you uninstall it, except the subscription agreements themselves and the customers' payment information. What to export and in what order to proceed when you change app is covered in Switching subscription apps on Shopify with active subscribers.

Where each thing is managed is also written down. From the admin: adding subscriptions to products and managing them in Purchase options, subscription-only discounts, the default purchase options policy, your customers' subscriptions and their payment methods, and the orders that carry a subscription. From the app: adding plans, changing existing subscriptions, and the app's own settings, which depend on the app you installed.

Shopify also sets rules for the apps, and three of them protect you as a merchant. An app may not charge a customer more than the plan says. The storefront must state clearly what the customer is agreeing to. And any change a customer agrees to must be written back to Shopify right away, so that, in Shopify's words, "merchants are never locked into a particular subscription provider."

4. What the customer sees

On the product page: the widget of section 2, with the selected option, the plan options and their prices, and the button.

At checkout: the order summary shows the frequency and the discount of the subscription, and the Shipping method section shows the shipping cost per delivery. Then a consent step: "During checkout, your customer needs to agree to the cancelation policy terms to confirm that they understand they're purchasing a subscription. They can't complete their purchase without agreeing to this policy."

That policy exists as soon as you set up a subscription: Shopify adds a purchase options cancellation policy to your store, linked in the checkout footer as the subscription policy. If you leave it empty, your customer sees a template generated by Shopify.

It is edited under your store policies, in Settings. On plans other than Plus, some of the text shown at checkout for orders with a subscription cannot be removed or edited.

Payment methods: the customer needs a payment method that can be charged again later. Local, manual and non-card methods may not be available for subscriptions.

Before each charge, with the free app: "Shopify Subscriptions emails your customer 3 days before each recurring order is charged." The reminder gives them time to skip the order, update their card, pause or cancel. Subscriptions run by a third-party app follow that app's own notification schedule.

In the customer account, with the free app: the customer signs in with "their email address and a 6-digit verification code"; no password is required. From the Subscriptions tab they can skip the next order, pause ("Subscriptions are paused effective immediately and customers won't receive any further charges or upcoming orders"), resume, cancel ("billing and delivery ends immediately. Canceling a subscription cannot be undone"), and edit the payment method or the shipping address.

Two conditions apply. Account access from the store menu works only when customer accounts are activated. And the management page, the order buttons and the thank-you link are blocks you add yourself in Settings > Checkout, in the checkout and accounts editor.

With a third-party app, this customer-facing management is the app's responsibility, as section 3 says.

Before you start: what Shopify requires

A payment gateway from Shopify's list. For the free app: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net, Adyen or Stripe. Availability depends on your region and on the gateway's own terms; Stripe is "Available only to select merchants."
A sales channel that supports it. "Subscription products are supported only on the online store, Shopify POS, Shop, and custom storefront sales channels." "Subscriptions can't be used with draft orders."
A theme with sections and blocks (section 2).
Known limits of the free app: "Bundles aren't compatible with the Shopify Subscriptions app." Gift cards count for the first payment only. Automatic discounts created in the Discounts section can apply to subscription orders.
A staff role that can see it: the staff member needs the apps and sales channels permission to open the subscription app.

Five things to check on your own store

Open a product page in a private window, on a phone. Which option is selected before you touch anything? What does the button say?
Read the plan name as it appears in the cart: it is the same text your customer sees at checkout and on the order.
Open Settings and read the subscription policy. If it is empty, your customer sees Shopify's generated template.
Check that customer accounts are activated and that the Subscription management block is added, or that your app's portal is reachable from the account.
After each theme update, check that the widget is still there and still once. A separate guide (a French-language guide) walks through that check.

Sources

Shopify, "About subscriptions", https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/purchase-options/subscriptions (read October 6, 2026), written for app developers.
Shopify, "Purchase options", https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/purchase-options (read October 6, 2026), written for app developers.
Shopify, "Selling plans", https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/purchase-options/subscriptions/selling-plans (read October 6, 2026), written for app developers.
Shopify, "Model a subscriptions solution", https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/purchase-options/subscriptions/model-subscriptions-solution (read October 6, 2026), written for app developers.
Shopify, "About subscription contracts", https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/purchase-options/subscriptions/contracts (read October 6, 2026), written for app developers.
Shopify, "Subscriptions" (themes), https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/themes/pricing-payments/subscriptions (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify, "Subscription UX guidelines", https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/themes/pricing-payments/subscriptions/subscription-ux-guidelines (read October 6, 2026), written for app and theme developers.
Shopify Help Center, "Subscriptions", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Setting up subscriptions", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/setup (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Managing subscriptions in your Shopify admin", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/manage-subscriptions (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Incorporating subscriptions into your e-commerce business strategy", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/model-types (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Understanding the differences between Shopify Subscriptions app and Shopify pricing plans", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/shopify-subscriptions/app-vs-pricing-plan (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Setting up Shopify Subscriptions", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/shopify-subscriptions/setup (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Adding and editing subscription plans", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/shopify-subscriptions/manage-subscriptions/add-edit-plans (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Shopify Subscriptions customer experience", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/shopify-subscriptions/customer-experience (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Shopify Subscriptions app eligibility considerations", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/purchase-options/subscriptions/shopify-subscriptions/considerations (read October 6, 2026).
Shopify Help Center, "Using app blocks and app embeds in your theme", https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/theme-structure/extend/apps (read October 6, 2026).

Questions

Does Shopify offer a subscription service? In the sense of selling subscriptions, yes: Shopify publishes a free first-party app, Shopify Subscriptions, and lists third-party subscription apps in its App Store. This is distinct from Shopify's pricing plans, which its Help Center treats as a separate matter: the app manages recurring sales, the plans define which features your store has.

Can I sell subscriptions on Shopify without an app? Not through the admin alone. Shopify's setup page starts with the app you chose from the App Store, and the only other route it names is a custom build by a developer on Shopify's subscription tools.

How do I see my subscriptions on Shopify? As a merchant, in two places: the Purchase options section of each product page shows the plans attached to it, and the admin lets you view and manage your customers' subscriptions and their payment methods; the app holds its own list and settings. Your customers see theirs in their customer account, from the Subscriptions tab with the free app, or in the app's own portal.

How do I manage subscriptions on Shopify? Products, discounts, the purchase options policy, customer subscriptions and orders are managed from the admin. Adding plans, changing existing subscriptions and app settings are managed in the app, and the settings available depend on the app you installed.

What happens to my subscriptions if I uninstall the app? Shopify's developer documentation states that "48 hours after a user uninstalls a subscription app, any subscription contracts that are owned by that app and that haven't been terminated are cancelled", whether active, paused or failed. The Help Center adds that the app's own data is deleted after 48 hours, except the subscription agreements and the customers' payment information. The export and the order of operations are in the guide on switching apps.