Subscriptions and recurring payments

A product with recurring billing, such as a monthly membership, is sold as a Stripe subscription on your own Stripe account. Sales › Subscriptions lists each one from the moment it started. Stripe charges the renewals itself; the app follows what happens and opens or closes access to match.

Before you start

• A recurring product, sold from a funnel page or a store. The usual one is a membership made under Products › Memberships, billed monthly or yearly. See Create a membership. A store basket starts a subscription when everything in it renews on the same schedule. A basket that mixes a subscription with anything else is refused, and the shopper pays for the subscription on its own.
• Stripe connected under Settings › Payments.

Steps: see your subscriptions

1. Open Sales › Subscriptions.
2. Read the table: Started, Customer, Plan, Amount paid and Status.
3. Click a customer's name to open the order behind the subscription.

The Status column shows Paid for an active subscription, Pending for a first payment by bank debit that has not settled, Cancelled for one that has ended, Refunded, or disputed.

Only the first payment is recorded here. Renewals are charged and receipted in Stripe, and the note under the table says so.

Steps: cancel a subscription

There is no cancel button in the app. Subscriptions live in your Stripe account, so you cancel them there.

1. Sign in to your Stripe dashboard.
2. Find the customer's subscription and cancel it, now or at the end of the period.
3. When Stripe ends the subscription, the app marks the order Cancelled, closes the member's access, and emails you that it has ended.

What happens when a renewal fails

1. Stripe refuses a renewal payment. The member keeps their access while Stripe retries.
2. The member gets a Payment didn't go through email with Stripe's page for paying that invoice with a card that works. You get an email too. Each is sent once per invoice, however many times Stripe retries.
3. If a retry succeeds, nothing changes for the member.
4. If Stripe gives up and ends the subscription, the order becomes Cancelled and access closes.
5. If a lapsed membership is paid again, the order goes back to Paid, access opens, and the member gets an Access to what they bought email with their link.

What happens next

• An affiliate partner who sold the subscription can earn on its renewals, depending on your program's rules. See Commissions on your sales.
• A discount code on a subscription comes off the first payment only.
• The wording of the member's emails can be changed under Marketing › Email › System emails.

For agencies

This page covers subscriptions a business sells to its own customers. The plans your clients pay you for are managed from your agency pages, not here.

Troubleshooting

The tab says "No subscriptions yet". A subscription appears when somebody buys a recurring product. One-off purchases are under Sales › Orders.

A member cancelled in Stripe but can still get in. Access closes when Stripe ends the subscription. If it was cancelled "at the end of the period", Stripe ends it on that date, and access closes then.

A renewal payment is not in the list. Renewals are not listed in the app; only the first payment is. See them in your Stripe dashboard.

A member says they paid but access is still closed. Open the order from Sales › Subscriptions. If it says Pending, a bank debit has not settled yet. If it says Cancelled, the subscription ended; they need to buy again, or pay the open invoice in Stripe if it is still there.

Related

• Create a membership
• Refunds and disputes
• Receipts, invoices and tax
• Fix buyers who cannot get into what they bought