Let customers buy your membership as a gift. When you enable gifting on a billing option, that option becomes available as a prepaid gift: the buyer pays once, the recipient claims it by email, and access runs for one cycle of that billing option. There’s no recurring subscription on a gifted membership, and the recipient is never charged.

Gift memberships are available on the Growth and Plus plans.

When you’d use this

• You want to offer memberships as a giftable product, especially around gifting seasons.
• You want a prepaid, fixed-length version of a plan that ends cleanly instead of renewing.

How to use it

1. Open the billing option you want to make giftable

Gifting is set on each billing option (cadence), not on the plan as a whole, so you decide exactly which terms can be gifted. Go to Membership plans, open the plan, and edit the billing option you want to enable.

2. Enable “Allow gift purchases”

In the billing option’s settings, enable Allow gift purchases. When it’s on, that option becomes giftable: buyers are charged once, and the recipient gets a claim link by email. Access starts when the recipient claims it and runs for one cycle of that billing option.

The gifted duration matches the billing option’s own interval. Enabling gifting on a 12-month option gifts 12 months of access; enabling it on a monthly option gifts one month. To offer a longer gift, enable gifting on a longer-term billing option.

3. Save and add the plan to a product

Save the plan. Zendra automatically prepares the gift version of the option behind the scenes, including a separate gift selling plan group in Shopify, so the As a gift choice can appear in the membership widget on products that offer this plan.

What a gift includes

A gift is exactly one prepaid billing cycle of the option you enabled it on. A few consequences follow from that:

• The length is the interval. A gifted annual option is a year of access; a gifted quarterly option is three months. There’s no separate “gift length” setting.
• Nothing renews. When the cycle ends, access ends, and the recipient decides whether to continue with their own purchase. Zendra’s gift emails handle the reminder.
• On a subscribe & save plan, one cycle is one delivery. If the plan ships a physical product each cycle, a gifted monthly option is a single bag or box plus one month of member perks, not a run of three or six deliveries. Prepaying several deliveries as one gift isn’t available yet. A longer interval doesn’t change this: a gifted “every 3 months” option is one delivery and three months of access.
• Giftable options are also buyable. There’s no gift-only billing option. Turning on gifting for a billing option keeps it available to customers buying for themselves, too. If you add a 12-month option so gifts run a full year, expect some customers to subscribe to it directly, and price it accordingly.

What the buyer and recipient experience

The buyer chooses As a gift in the membership widget, enters the recipient’s email (plus an optional recipient name and “From” name), and checks out. The buyer can check out as a guest; the recipient needs a customer account on your store to claim. The recipient gets a claim email, signs in to their account to claim it, and their access begins. For the full buyer-and-recipient walkthrough, see Gift a membership.

The claim link is valid for 90 days by default.

Gift email notifications

Gifting adds three transactional emails to your Email notifications, on top of the standard membership emails. Like the others, you can edit each one’s subject, preview text, and Liquid body, and control its send timing.

• Gift claim invite: sent to the recipient as soon as the gift is purchased, with the link to claim. Default subject: “You’ve been gifted a membership!”
• Gift prepaid ending soon: sent to the recipient before a prepaid gift’s term ends, prompting them to continue on their own. This email is skipped automatically for short gifts (a month or less), since the term would end before a reminder makes sense.
• Gift prepaid expired: sent to the recipient when a prepaid gift’s term ends, with the option to continue.

Common issues

• The “As a gift” option doesn’t appear on the storefront. Make sure gifting is enabled on a billing option of a plan that’s offered on the product.
• I cancelled or refunded a gift order. Does the recipient keep access? No. When you cancel or refund the order that paid for a gift, Zendra removes the access it funded, so gift access stays in sync with payment. See Membership lifecycle.
• A gifted term renewed or charged again. It won’t. Gift memberships are prepaid for a single cycle with no recurring billing. If a recipient wants to keep access, they make a new, separate purchase.
• I want a different gift length. The gift length is the billing option’s interval. Enable gifting on (or add) a billing option with the interval you want to gift.
• A gifted product subscription only shipped once. That’s expected: a gift is one billing cycle, and on a subscribe & save plan one cycle is one delivery. Prepaid multi-delivery gifts aren’t available yet.
• Customers are subscribing to an option I meant for gifts. Any giftable billing option is also available for self-purchase. Set its price and interval so that’s a fine outcome.

Keep learning

• Gift a membership — the buyer and recipient experience.
• Email notifications — customize the gift emails and all other membership emails.
• Recurring billing & subscriptions — how billing options and their prices work.
• Purchasing a membership — how customers join for themselves.