Billing cycles

A subscription billing cycle is a scheduled interval in which a subscription contract attempts to bill a customer for a set of items.

Billing cycles are useful for when you want to make temporary changes to a subscription contract over a specific period without overwriting any of the source subscription data. Here are some example scenarios where billing cycles can be used to modify subscriptions:

  • The customer has an existing subscription, but they want to skip one delivery without cancelling the subscription
  • The merchant is temporarily out of stock for a subscription product, and wants to ship a replacement product instead
  • The merchant wants to create cross-sell or upsell offers for existing subscription customers, such as a discount for adding a product to one order
  • The customer has multiple subscriptions, and the merchant wants to combine their contract information into one order to save on shipping and billing costs

This guide describes what billing cycles are, the workflow for editing a billing cycle, and some considerations before you get started.