Create a post-purchase subscription

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to do the following tasks:

• Update your app with the required scopes to manage subscriptions
• Add UI elements to allow buyers to select one time or subscription products
• Update the app server to return subscription data

• You've completed Getting started with post-purchase checkout extensions.

You can't create a post-purchase subscription that does the following:

• Modifies a subscription on an order with an existing subscription
• Adds a subscription to an order with an existing subscription
• Converts a one-time purchase into a subscription order

To offer a customer a subscription, a product needs to have an associated selling plan group. Selling plans represent how products can be sold and purchased. When you create a selling plan, you can determine the policies under which a product can be sold. For example, you can create a selling plan where a customer can purchase a subscription on a monthly billing cycle, and where you offer a 15% discount for weekly deliveries of the product.

To create a selling plan and associate it to a product, you need to add the write_purchase_options scope to the app.

Update the app scopes in the shopify.app.toml file to include the write_purchase_options scope. This scope allows you to create selling plan groups.

After you update scopes, when you navigate to the app home in the Shopify admin, you should be prompted to reauthorize the app to allow editing of purchase options. If you're not prompted to reauthorize, restart your server, and then navigate to the app home in the Shopify admin.

Use the GraphQL Admin API to create a selling plan group, and associate a product with the selling plan group. In the following cURL command, add the myshopify domain of your development store, the access token for the app, and the product and variant IDs of the product that you're offering in the upsell.

Update the OFFERS array in the app/offer.server.js file that you created in the previous tutorial to return an offer with the selling plan information that you created in the previous step.

Replace the content of your extension script with the following code.

The following sections explain how different parts of the example extension code in Step 2 works.

To show the selling plan options to buyers, you need to use the Select component. When a buyer selects a new selling plan, we update the value of the selected purchase option.

After you've updated the code, the selling plan option renders as follows:

To show the price breakdown matching the currently selected offer, you need to call calculateChangeset when the buyer selects a selling plan:

After you've updated the code, the price breakdown renders as follows:

For subscription offers, you need to display the recurring subtotal of the order.

After you've updated the code, the recurring subtotal renders as follows:

To add a subscription item to an order, the buyer’s payment method must be vaulted for future billing cycles of the subscription. Before you can vault the buyer's payment method, the buyer has to explicitly give consent to the subscription policies. Use the BuyerConsent component in App Bridge to collect consent:

This component creates a checkbox and a link to the subscription policies.

For the add_subscription change to be accepted, the value of the buyer consent checkbox needs to be provided as a new parameter to the applyChangeset method. Without this parameter, the changeset won’t be applied and an error is returned.

Complete a test order on your store and go through the checkout steps. When the post-purchase page appears, add a subscription product to your order. Navigate to the orders section of the Shopify Admin. You should see that on the latest order you have a one time as well as a subscription product.

• Get familiar with the UX guidelines for creating subscriptions with post-purchase checkout extensions.