Zendra supports multiple types of subscription billing models for your membership! Offering subscriptions is a great way to create more predictable cash flow, increase customer lifetime value, and to improve profitability (making more from existing customers).
Subscribers are more likely to purchase from your store again, and have higher average order values and brand affinity.
When you’d use this
- Sell memberships as recurring subscriptions.
- Offer subscribe & save for physical products on a schedule.
- Set billing intervals and options for paid plans.
Offer subscriptions for digital access
If your membership is for perks or digital content access, you’ll choose “An access fee” or “A billing cycle”.
- Choose An access fee if you want to offer a lifetime or one-time purchase for a single variant product. You can also offer subscriptions alongside one-time purchase.
- Choose A billing cycle if you only want to offer subscriptions, or if your membership product has variants that do not affect access or digital perks (e.g. different physical welcome gifts the member can choose).
If you want to offer tiered perks, create a new membership plan for each tier. Trigger each plan by the tier’s variant, not the parent product, so the correct perks will be used for that tier / level when purchased.
Just bear in mind that price overrides on the billing plans will override the product price — usually this is fine for a simple product or single variant, but it can get more complex if variants come into the equation.
Check out our recipes for similar membership setups: you can sell a single premium membership like Barnes & Noble, or a tiered premium membership like Best Buy.
Offer subscribe & save for regular deliveries
If you want to sell a subscription to the membership product (trigger), choose “An item purchase”. This will use the product or variant price for your subscription. You can optionally offer discounts for a billing plan — for example, to discount more frequent deliveries (as a percentage or amount off the variant price).
We recommend you avoid price overrides if your product has variants. If you use discounts instead, Zendra will inherit the variant price for a billing cycle, and calculate the discounted amount based off the variant price.
For example, if you sell coffee bags in 0.25kg and 1.0kg sizes (variants), you can still set up multiple billing plans (e.g. every month, every 2 weeks). Without a price override, Zendra will just charge the selected variant price on your schedule.
If you want to encourage folks to get more frequent deliveries, apply a discount for the more frequent subscription. This will adjust the variant price when that billing interval is selected.
Check out our recipes for similar membership setups: sell a coffee subscription like Counter Culture.
Configure billing plans
Each billing plan has a few things you can configure — some billing plan options are forced or disabled, depending on the others in use.
- Price override: Forces a specific price to be used for the billing interval. This price will be used for all variants, when this billing plan is selected by the customer.
- If using product price as an access fee, you will be required to configure a price override for all billing plans.
Price overrides affect all variants of the product, so we only recommend using them for simple products (one variant).
- Discount: Offer a discount (adjusts the product price) when this billing plan is selected. Helpful to incentivize more frequent deliveries!
- Discounts cannot be used in addition to a price override.
- Trials & signup fees: Choose what happens at signup — you can offer a free trial for a set number of days, or charge a signup fee immediately when subscribing.
- 💡 Trial length is its own setting, independent of the billing plan’s interval — a 10-day trial works the same whether the plan bills weekly, monthly, or annually.
- Minimum orders: Choose the minimum number of orders / cycles required for the member to be allowed to self-cancel (e.g. they must have 3 cycles before they can cancel the subscription).
- Maximum orders: Set a maximum number of cycles (recurrences) to charge — helpful if a subscription has a natural “end” (e.g. 12 boxes are shipped).
Common issues
- Customers can only buy once. Add a billing plan to the product so a recurring option appears.
- A renewal didn’t charge. See Membership lifecycle & billing recovery for retries and recovery.