Selling plans: frequencies, discounts & prepaid offers

1. What a selling plan group is

A selling plan group is one subscription offer. It attaches to products and defines the delivery frequencies a shopper can choose on the product page — "every month", "every 2 months", and so on — each with its own discount. Sublyra creates these as real Shopify selling plan groups, so they work with Shopify's own checkout, customer accounts and subscription contract APIs. Nothing is subscribable until at least one group exists.

The pieces, top to bottom:

2. Create your first offer

1 Open the Sublyra admin and go to Selling plans.

2 Under Create a subscribe & save offer, give the offer a name — this is shown to shoppers in the product page widget, so write it for them ("Subscribe & Save", not "SPG-01"). The internal description is optional and never shown to shoppers.

3 Choose what the offer applies to — every product, specific collections, hand-picked products, or individual variants. Details in section 7.

4 Add your plans: one row per frequency. For each plan set a name, an interval (days, weeks or months), an interval count, and a discount percentage. Use Add plan for more frequencies, up to six.

5 Click Create offer. The button shows how many products the offer will attach to. Sublyra creates the selling plan group in Shopify and marks the first plan as recommended.

3. Frequencies and anchor days

Each plan's frequency is an interval plus an interval count:

The plan name is what shoppers actually read, so name plans the way you'd say them out loud: "Every month", "Every 6 weeks".

Anchor days (optional)

An anchor day pins billing to a specific day instead of "the same weekday/date as the first order":

• Weekly plans: a day of the week (1–7).
• Monthly plans: a day of the month (1–28).
• Daily plans and prepaid plans: anchors don't apply — the field is ignored.

Anchors are useful when you want all subscribers billed together — for example, every subscription renewing on the 1st of the month so fulfilment ships in one batch.

4. Discounts

Each plan carries its own percentage discount (0–99%), applied by Shopify to every order on that plan. A few practical notes:

• Different frequencies can have different discounts. A common pattern is a small discount on the frequent plan and a larger one on the bulk plan — "10% off monthly, 15% off every 3 months" — because the longer interval is worth more to you in reduced churn and shipping consolidation.
• The widget shows the savings for you. With "Show savings on each frequency" enabled in the widget settings, each frequency button displays its discount, and the savings badge surfaces the best one ("Save up to 15%"). See the widget guide.
• 0% is valid. Some products sell on convenience, not price — a 0% plan still gives shoppers the subscribe option without touching your margin.

5. Discounts that reward staying

A flat "10% off forever" is the simplest subscription discount, but it front-loads all the value on order one — the order you were going to get anyway. The alternative is to sequence rewards across renewals: keep the signup discount modest and add milestone rewards that fire as the subscriber completes orders.

In Sublyra this lives in Settings → Loyalty & referrals, not on the selling plan itself:

1 Go to Settings → Loyalty & referrals.

2 Add milestones: at renewal N, give a discount on the next renewal order or store credit straight onto the customer's balance. The reward fires automatically when the contract hits that renewal count.

3 Put something real at the second order — that's the highest-churn moment for most stores, and a balance to protect gives the subscriber a reason to stay.

6. Prepaid plans

A prepaid plan charges the shopper once, up front, for a fixed run of deliveries — "3 months of coffee, paid today". Recurring plans charge per delivery; prepaid plans charge the full amount at checkout and then ship on the delivery schedule.

1 On the Selling plans page, add a plan and set its kind to Prepaid.

2 Set the delivery interval — how often shipments go out (e.g. every month).

3 Set the delivery count — how many deliveries the upfront payment covers (e.g. 3). Every prepaid plan needs a count of at least 1.

4 Set the discount as usual. On prepaid, the discount applies to the whole upfront charge.

The widget handles the presentation: prepaid plans get a Prepaid badge and show the plan length and price per delivery, so shoppers understand exactly what they're committing to before checkout.

7. Plan scopes: what the offer applies to

Every offer has a scope, chosen when you create or edit it:

8. The recommended plan

Each offer has one recommended plan — the frequency the widget badges as recommended and pre-selects for the shopper. Pre-selection matters: the plan that's already chosen when the page loads is the plan most subscribers end up on.

1 New offers default to recommending the first plan in the list.

2 To change it, find the offer in the group list on the Selling plans page and click Set as recommended on the plan you want.

3 Clicking the current recommended plan again removes the recommendation — the widget then falls back to pre-selecting the first plan.

9. Minimum commitment (min cycles)

Recurring plans can require a subscriber to complete a number of billing cycles before they may cancel — the classic "3-order minimum". Set it per plan with the min cycles field; leave it empty for no commitment.

• The limit is enforced where it matters: the customer portal refuses the cancellation and tells the subscriber how many cycles remain. It is not a cosmetic UI hint.
• Max cycles does the opposite — the subscription ends itself after N billing cycles, for fixed-run programs ("6-month challenge").
• Neither applies to prepaid plans; the prepaid delivery count already defines the run.

10. Editing and deleting offers

Editing: click an offer in the group list to reopen the same form. You can rename the offer, change its scope, add or remove plans, and retune discounts. Saving syncs everything to Shopify and keeps the widget's data current. If an edit deletes the recommended plan, the recommendation re-points to the first surviving plan so the widget never references a dead plan.

Deleting: deleting an offer removes the selling plan group from Shopify and from every product it was attached to. These are live Shopify objects — treat delete as final for the offer itself.

11. FAQ

How many plans should one offer have?

Two or three. Up to six are supported, but every extra frequency is another decision for the shopper. "Monthly" plus "every 2 or 3 months" covers most catalogs; add prepaid as the third when it fits the product.

Can one product belong to two offers?

It can, but it usually shouldn't — the shopper would see two overlapping sets of frequencies. Keep each product in one offer and use scopes to draw the boundaries.

Do I need to configure anything else before plans show on my storefront?

Yes — the offer is only half the job. The Subscribe & Save widget must be on your product template (app embed or block), which the widget guide and the in-app Setup checklist walk through. Then place a test order to see the full flow.

What happens to a prepaid subscription after the last delivery?

The upfront payment covered a fixed number of deliveries, so the run simply completes — there's no recurring charge to cancel. The subscriber can start a new prepaid plan any time from the product page.

Where do I see which plan a subscriber is on?

Sublyra admin → Subscriptions lists every contract with its frequency, next order date and completed cycles, filterable and exportable to CSV.

Related guides

• The widget — how these offers render on the product page
• Bundles — build-a-box offers on top of selling plans
• Memberships — a membership sold as a subscription product
• The customer portal — how subscribers manage the plans you create