Shopify Subscriptions is Shopify's free first-party app for selling products on a recurring basis. It runs inside your Shopify admin, creates auto-billed plans that renew weekly, monthly or yearly, and gives customers a widget on the product page plus self-service control to skip, pause or cancel. This Shopify subscriptions guide covers what the app does, the three business models that fit it, the setup order that avoids rework, and the question that decides whether subscriptions work for an Indian store: whether your gateway supports recurring billing at all. Keep Shopify's subscriptions overview and considerations page open while you plan.
Key Takeaways
• Shopify Subscriptions is a free first-party app connected to your store admin. It renews weekly, monthly or yearly, supports four discount types, and gives customers self-service skip, pause and cancel.
• Shopify's documented gateway list for third-party subscription apps is Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net, Adyen and Stripe. India is not a Shopify Payments country, so confirm your gateway before building the catalogue.
• Shopify states customers "generally need to use a supported payment method that can be billed for recurring subscription payments", and that local, manual or non-credit-card payment methods might not be available. Check this before promising UPI or COD subscribers.
• Automatic discounts from the Discounts section apply to subscription orders. Shopify Scripts discounts and gift cards apply to the first payment only.
• Shopify India plan pricing, retrieved 26 September 2026: Basic ₹1,499/month annual (₹1,994 monthly), Grow ₹5,599/month (₹7,447), Advanced ₹22,680/month (₹30,164), Plus from ₹1,75,000/month — each with a separate third-party transaction fee.
• Subscriptions run on the Online Store, Shopify POS, Shop and custom storefronts, not draft orders, and bundles are documented as incompatible with the app.
What the Shopify Subscriptions app actually does
The app is a purchase-option layer on top of ordinary Shopify products. You are not creating a separate product type; you are attaching a selling plan to a product or variant, and the customer picks it on the product page. The documented capability list (Shopify Subscriptions) covers auto-billed subscriptions renewing weekly, monthly or yearly; modifying, skipping, pausing and cancelling plans and contracts; four discount types; a subscription widget on your online store; subscription details on the product, cart and thank-you pages; email notifications; and analytics on active, paused and cancelled subscriptions.
Customers manage their own plan from their customer account — they can view one-time and subscription purchases, resume, skip or cancel, and update payment methods and shipping address. That self-service surface is the most valuable thing in the app, because a cancellation handled by the customer costs you nothing, while one handled by your support inbox costs you a conversation.
Note what is not native. Shopify lists the second setup route as building a custom solution on the subscription API, which "requires experience in using APIs". That is the escape hatch if the first-party app cannot express your pricing model.
Pick the model before you touch the app
Shopify's own strategy documentation sorts subscriptions into three models, and the differences matter more than the app choice (subscription business model types):
• Curation or subscription boxes. Surprise-and-delight boxes with new items each cycle. Shopify lists high profit potential and personalisation as the benefit, and high churn and operational complexity as the risk. If you ship curated boxes, your real work is pick-and-pack, not software.
• Replenishment. Automating repeat purchases of consumables. Shopify lists higher conversion and retention against the risk of thin margins. This is the model most Indian D2C stores should start with: skincare refills, filter cartridges, pet food, cleaning supplies.
• Access. A monthly fee that buys lower prices or member-only perks — greater perceived value and bundling opportunities, against the risk of greater time investment, because members expect you to keep producing value.
On billing mechanics, Shopify describes pay-as-you-go, where the customer pays each cycle, and pre-paid, where the customer pays in advance for a set number of months. Pre-paid improves your cash position at the cost of refund handling complexity. The practical advice is to launch one model on three to five SKUs: a subscription programme is a forecasting and fulfilment commitment, and the app will not fix a model that churns.
Set it up in the order that avoids rework
Install the Shopify Subscriptions app from the Shopify App Store. Because it is a first-party app it is connected to the store rather than bolted alongside it, so subscription data shows up in the Customers list, customer profiles, product pages, Discounts, the Orders list and analytics. The order that avoids rework:
• Confirm the gateway first. Do this before anything else, because it can invalidate the plan.
• Define selling plan groups and attach them to the product or variant. A selling plan group is the container for your subscription options; keep its name customer-facing plain, because "Subscribe and save, monthly" reads better than an internal code.
• Add the subscription widget to the product template. Shopify's setup guide describes selecting an existing product template or creating a new one and adding the Subscription widget block, then matching it to your theme.
• Add the manage-subscription link to the thank-you page, and write the cancellation policy it points to. That policy is not optional paperwork; the checkout disclosure links to it directly.
• Test the whole cycle end to end before you announce it: place an order, then confirm the renewal charge, the shipment and the notification email.
The gateway question that decides it in India
This is the part most guides skip. Shopify's considerations page states that you must use one of the supported payment gateways for subscriptions, and that customers "generally need to use a supported payment method that can be billed for recurring subscription payments. Local, manual, or non-credit-card payment methods might not be available for subscriptions." The documented supported gateway list, in Shopify's words for third-party subscription apps, is Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net, Adyen and Stripe.
Now overlay India. Shopify's supported-countries page for Shopify Payments does not list India. That matters twice over: you cannot rely on Shopify Payments for an Indian entity, and the third-party transaction fee on your plan is therefore a permanent cost rather than something you can engineer away. So the honest sequence for an Indian store is:
• Ask your gateway, in writing, whether it supports recurring charges on Shopify checkout, and which instruments are included. Not "auto-billing" in general — recurring mandates specifically.
• Treat UPI and COD as a separate question from cards. A one-off UPI push payment is not automatically a recurring mandate, and a manual payment method is by definition not auto-billed.
• If your gateway is not on Shopify's documented list, ask Shopify support whether the first-party app is available with it. The list is published for third-party apps, so the answer is not obvious from the page alone.
• If the answer is no, you have two routes: change gateways, or build on the subscription API. The second is real engineering work — contracts, billing cycles, mandates, retry logic and dunning — and it is what our custom app development service handles. Our guide to Shopify COD and UPI in India covers the one-time payment mix, which is a different problem from recurring mandates.
What a Shopify subscription actually costs
Separate four cost lines. Most mistakes come from counting only the first.
1. The plan fee. Shopify's official India pricing page, retrieved 26 September 2026, lists Basic at ₹1,499/month on annual billing (₹1,994 month-to-month), Grow at ₹5,599/month annual (₹7,447 monthly), Advanced at ₹22,680/month annual (₹30,164 monthly), and Plus from ₹1,75,000/month. See shopify.com/pricing.
2. The Shopify third-party transaction fee. Because you are not on Shopify Payments, this applies to every order: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. On a subscription, a recurring percentage applies to a recurring order, so it compounds with every cycle.
3. Your gateway's fee. Razorpay's public India rate card, last updated May 2026 and retrieved 26 September 2026, lists a 2% platform fee per successful domestic transaction plus 18% GST, with zero setup fee, zero annual maintenance charge and zero refund processing fee. For its Subscriptions product the same card lists 0.9% plus platform fees on cards, and states that pricing for UPI (BHIM, Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm and 52 others), NACH and e-mandate is available on request. That last line is the one to chase. See Razorpay pricing.
4. Per-order operational overhead. This is the line that quietly decides whether replenishment works. Every renewal is a separate order to pick, pack, label, hand to the courier and reconcile, and Shopify notes that recurring shipments are billed and fulfilled separately even when their delivery dates overlap. Multiply by cycles per year and divide by contribution margin per order, and you have the real cost of a subscription. Two documented constraints to design around: bundles are not compatible with the Shopify Subscriptions app, and Shopify Scripts that adjust subscription costs or shipping rates applied only to the first payment.## The checkout disclosure you cannot remove
When a cart contains a subscription, Shopify adds a disclosure assembled from six parts, beginning "Your cart contains an automatically renewing subscription." Shopify's documentation states plainly that the subscription disclosure cannot be removed on any plan.
What you can edit depends on your plan. Editing Purchase options subscription agreement label and Purchase options subscription consent text is Shopify Plus only. On all plans you can edit Purchase options subscription cancel text and Purchase options subscription cancellation instructions through the theme content editor, and the cancellation policy itself under Settings > Policies. Keep the {{ consent_text }}, {{ cancel_text }}, {{ cancellation_instructions }} and {{ cancellation_policy_label }} variables intact, or the removed fragment silently reverts to Shopify's default wording. For an Indian store, treat this as a compliance surface and have any customer-facing cancellation commitment reviewed before you localise it.
Shipping, delivery cadence and inventory
Shipping is where most first implementations go wrong, because the first shipment and the recurring shipments are governed differently. Shopify documents that the shipping method a customer selects at checkout applies to the initial delivery and to any one-time items in the same order, and that after the initial delivery, recurring shipments revert to the default shipping method for subscriptions — the least expensive available method. So the shipping discount you sell with is a first-order discount: if you promise free shipping on every recurring box, verify the recurring rate. And the delivery frequency excludes the transit window — Shopify's example is a subscription shipping on the 15th with a 5-day delivery time arriving on the 19th. Publish the arrival date, not just the dispatch date.
For inventory, a subscription turns your forecast from a guess into a schedule, but it also turns a stockout into a broken commitment to a customer who already paid. Model your reorder point on committed subscriber quantity, not on recent order volume.
Measure churn, not just revenue
Shopify's analytics surface for subscriptions is built around active, paused and cancelled counts. Separately, subscription data becomes available in all sales reports once you add the Purchase option dimension as a filter or column. That is the practical path to a cohort view: segment sales reports by purchase option and read cancellation counts against cohort size over time. Report three numbers every month — active subscribers by plan and acquisition month, failed or retried charges by gateway response, and skip and pause rates, which are early-warning signals well before cancellation. Read all three against contribution margin per order, not against revenue alone. The cohort data behind these reports is also what a CRM or warehouse system needs, and our database solutions service covers that layer when it has to live outside Shopify.
Use email to run the retention work. The app sends subscription order notifications, and the wider lifecycle programme is worth building deliberately — see our Shopify email marketing for ecommerce guide. Give the whole rollout a 30-day window rather than launching site-wide: confirm the gateway in week one, configure plans and the widget in weeks two and three, run a paid end-to-end test in week four, and soft launch to a consent-based segment. If you are sending lifecycle email, remember the consent question in India is a real obligation, not a formality. Working on the store itself? Our Shopify website building service covers theme, product template and checkout configuration.
Frequently asked questions
Is Shopify Subscriptions free?
The app itself is free to install and runs inside your admin. You still pay your Shopify plan, your gateway's transaction fee, and the third-party transaction fee that applies because you are not on Shopify Payments. Those are the costs that decide whether a subscription is viable at your margin.
Can I charge a subscription through UPI or COD?
Not reliably, and you should verify rather than assume. Shopify states that local, manual and non-credit-card payment methods might not be available for subscriptions, because a subscription needs a method that can be billed repeatedly. A one-off UPI payment and a cash-on-delivery order are both single attempts, and recurring UPI mandates are a separate instrument whose support depends on your gateway.
What happens to my subscription data if I uninstall the app?
Shopify documents that if you uninstall a subscription app, subscription data — excluding subscription contracts and customer payment information — is deleted after 48 hours. Export what you need before removing anything.
Confirm the gateway before you commit the catalogue
If the gateway cannot carry recurring mandates, that is an architecture decision, and it is worth an hour of engineering rather than a launch and a retreat. Need someone to review your subscription setup or build the recurring flow around your gateway? Talk to GrowMyStore about building or extending your Shopify store.