About selling plans

• Your app can make authenticated requests to the GraphQL Admin API.
• Your app has the write_products, read_customer_payment_methods, read_own_subscription_contracts, and write_own_subscription_contracts access scopes. Learn how to configure your access scopes using Shopify CLI.
• You've created products and product variants in your development store.
• To be eligible to use Shopify subscriptions, users need to meet the qualifying criteria.

Selling plans are organized into selling plan groups, which represent a selling method or purchase option. The following diagram shows the object relationships between selling plan groups, products, variants, selling plans, and policies.

Your app can subscribe to webhooks that are related to selling plans. The following examples show the JSON responses from each of the available webhooks.

To learn how to set up and consume webhooks, refer to the Webhook configuration overview.

Customers can buy one-time purchases and subscriptions when both are offered by a merchant. Some merchants might want to offer custom shipping rules for subscription purchases. You can use the DeliveryProfile object to create shipping profiles and associate them with selling plan groups. Here are some example scenarios where delivery profiles can be useful to implement custom shipping rules for subscription purchases:

• A merchant wants to offer free or discounted shipping on subscriptions.
• A merchant wants to limit subscription purchases to certain shipping destinations.
• A merchant wants to offer local pickup for one-time purchases of a product, but requires shipping for subscription purchases.

By default, a product has the same shipping rate whether it's bought as a one-time purchase or as part of a subscription. To calculate subscription shipping separately from one-time purchases, you can associate a DeliveryProfile object with the selling plan group using the deliveryProfileCreate or deliveryProfileUpdate mutation.

When one-time purchases and subscriptions are in the same delivery profile, coming from the same location, shipping for one-time purchases is calculated and combined with the subscription purchases. Subsequent subscription shipping rates are calculated separately.

Shipping rates that are specific to a selling plan group don't display in the Shipping and delivery settings in the Shopify admin. You need to configure shipping rates for selling plan groups in your app.

When multiple subscriptions are in the cart, shipping rates are consolidated if they share the same selling plan billing and delivery policies.

Customers can select a shipping rate for one-time purchase products in the cart if more than one rate is available. They can also view the total cost of shipping for their subscriptions and the total cost of shipping for one-time purchases:

When choosing local delivery or pickup methods, the chosen method applies to the entire order. Mixed delivery methods aren't supported.

For example, if the customer has a one-time purchase and subscription on the same cart, and they select local pickup at checkout, then they can't choose shipping or local delivery for the subscription. All items would be fulfilled as local pickup.

Shopify automatically creates subscription contracts when products with selling plans are purchased through checkout. Subscription contracts are detached from the original selling plan. Updates to the original selling plan don't modify pre-existing subscription contracts.

To make changes to those contracts, you can update their delivery prices and delivery methods with the subscriptionDraftUpdate mutation.

When querying a shipping rate for a subscription draft, the returned shipping rate depends on whether the subscription contract has a selling plan ID and variant ID:

• If the subscription contract doesn't have a selling plan ID, then the shipping rates from the delivery profile associated with the variant ID are displayed.
• If the subscription contract doesn't have a selling plan or variant ID, then the shipping rates from the shop's general delivery profile are displayed.

For more information on contracts, refer to Subscription contracts.

Anchors define the date when fulfillment is completed by a merchant or when delivery occurs for the customer for a given time cycle. You can also define a cutoff for which customers are eligible to enter this cycle and the desired behavior for customers who start their subscription inside the cutoff period.

If you need to define more advanced delivery behaviors for subscriptions, then you should use anchors. Here are some example scenarios where anchors can be useful to implement advanced delivery behavior:

• A merchant starts fulfillment on a specific date every month.
• A merchant wants to bill the 1st of every quarter.
• A customer expects their delivery every Tuesday.

If something occurs that delays a billing attempt past an anchor date, then fulfillment is also delayed to the next anchor date. You can prevent this by providing an appropriate originTime value when you create a new billing attempt.

An example is a subscription with anchor billing and fulfillment dates for the 15th of every month. If a customer's payment fails and doesn't go through until the 16th, then their order won't be fulfilled until the 15th of the next month. Providing an originTime value on or before the 15th allows the fulfillment to take place on schedule, regardless of whether the billing attempt was successful past the anchor date.

You can use the anchors, cutoff, and preAnchorBehavior properties of the recurring delivery policy on a selling plan to define the behavior for when customers are eligible to enter a delivery or fulfillment cycle:

The following table shows some example scenarios of what the expected next billing and delivery dates are for a subscription with billing and delivery anchor dates at the 15th of each month, given different first billing dates (when a subscription starts), cutoff, and preAnchorBehavior values:

For an example implementation of anchors, refer to the "Subscribe and save" example in the Create and manage selling plans guide.

• Learn how to create and manage selling plans to determine the policies under which products can be sold.