An Awtomic subscription plan defines the discount customers will get if they subscribe and also the intervals they can choose for their regular shipments. For example, a coffee company may choose to offer a 10% discount for subscribers and give the options of receiving shipments every 1 week, 2 weeks, or 4 weeks. A multivitamin company may choose to offer only 1 month as an option for subscribers for $5 off per shipment.

With Awtomic Subscriptions, you can create unlimited numbers of subscription plans for unlimited products, and you can apply multiple plans to the same product if it makes sense for your business. We will walk you through the process of creating a subscription plan below, and give you some tips and tricks for how to make them work best for your business as well.

How to name your Awtomic subscription plan?

You will pick two names for your subscription plan.

• Subscription Nickname: This should be meaningful to you, but will never be shown to your customers. You'll use this nickname to find the subscription plan you'd like like to edit in your Awtomic Admin only. It can be something about the products you’ll apply it to or the intervals you’ll enable, or anything else that helps you remember what it’s for. For example, if you’re selling coffee, maybe Whole Bean bags will have a different plan from your Pods product, so you could call the plan “Whole Bean Subscriptions” .
• Display Name: This is the text that will show up in the Awtomic Subscription widget on your Shopify product page. If you also offer one-time purchases, it will show up as an option below that. The most common copy to use here is something like “Subscribe & Save 10%.” You can also use something like “Monthly Subscription” depending on how you want it to read. It can be helpful to include the discount if you offer one to incentivize customers.

How to set up your Subscription Frequency?

Subscription Plan Renewal Frequency Options

Awtomic Subscriptions give Shopify Merchants the flexibility to easily customize & offer multiple subscription renewal options in each subscription plans. This will allow you to better serve your Shopify Subscription customers. You can set up various renewal frequencies for each of your plans. You can offer Subscription frequencies that are by Days, Weeks, Months, and/or Years.

You'll need to be sure to add at least one Frequency option in each plan. You can add as many as you want for each plan. These frequency options will be shown in the subscription widget on the Shopify Product Pages for products in this subscription plan. Customers can then choose from the available options to purchase their subscriptions.

Creating a Renewal Frequency Option

To create a renewal frequency option, you must specify a display name and the configuration details. The display name is what will show in the dropdown of options, and the configuration details will determine the length and type of period the customer must wait before their subscription renews.

Before the frequency options will be the text you define as the "Frequency prefix" (our recommendation is “Deliver every”) so make sure the display name you write will read well. This will also be concatenated together with the frequency display name in your cart (In the example above, it would read: "Deliver every 2 weeks" in the cart).

To add a new frequency, press “+ Add Frequency”. To delete one, press the trash can icon to the right of the frequency you wish to delete. You can also use the Grip icon on the left of the frequencies to drag them and change the order. The order will determine how they show in the drop down selector for customers.

The Frequency Display name will be the text shown to customers in the dropdown list when they are selecting the subscription they'd like to purchase. In the case that there is only one option, it will show below the Display name of the subscription plan (see examples below).

Adding a Subscription Plan discount

Not everyone decides to offer a discount for subscribing, but it can be a great incentive to convert users to subscription, especially if you offer one-time purchase options.

For each subscription plan, you can choose between three types of discounts: Standard, Dynamic or Frequency Specific subscription plan discount.

A Standard discount allows you to define a single discount that a customer will get for all orders in their subscription. You can create a standard discount with either a % or a dollar amount off and set any value you'd like.

A Dynamic discount allows you to to set two discounts: one initial discount and a number of orders that it will apply to, and then a recurring discount that will kick in after the initial discount length is completed. You can use this in a number of ways:

• To incentivize people to retain longer by offering a higher discount after the first few orders
• To incentivize users for the first purchase by giving them a bigger discount and then having it automatically set to a regular discount afterwards

You should use a Frequency Specific Discount, If you want to have different discounts option for your different frequencies. So perhaps you want to offer 20% off to subscribers who select a Frequency of every 2 weeks and only 10% off to subscribers who select a Frequency of only once a Month.

When you view the widget on your store, you'll see the frequency specific discount shows next to the display name of each frequency.

No matter how you choose to set up your Subscription Plan discounts they are part of the subscription and can be used along with discount codes that you create in Shopify.

Enable Subscription Shipping

Finally, you can also enable subscription shipping in this discount section. You can read more on how to create a subscription shipping profile in the settings portion of the help center, but once that profile is created, you can apply it to any subscription plan with the checkbox in the discount section. This is typically used to give users free shipping, but gives you the option of defining any zones and rates that make sense for your operations.

Remember to save your plan as you go! Check out the next article, "Assigning subscription plans to Products" for the last step in creating a subscription plan.