Billing and renewals

When customers are charged

The first charge is at checkout, made by the customer themselves. That order is recorded as the subscription's first cycle.

After that, Shopify charges on the plan's cadence. A monthly plan bought on the 3rd bills on the 3rd of each month. A weekly plan bought on a Tuesday bills every Tuesday.

For prepaid plans, the charge follows the billing interval, not the delivery one — a 3-month prepaid plan delivering monthly is charged every three months.

Month-end dates

Shopify handles the awkward dates. A subscription created on the 31st bills on the last day of shorter months, and does not drift earlier afterwards.

What happens on a renewal

1. Shopify charges the vaulted payment method
2. Shopify creates an order in your admin, with the subscription's line items and the plan's price
3. We record the cycle against the subscription and advance the next charge date
4. The customer gets a confirmation if you have that notification switched on

The resulting order is an ordinary Shopify order. Your fulfilment, accounting, reviews and analytics apps all see it exactly as they see any other.

Upcoming charges

Operations → Upcoming lists what is due and when, so you can see the week ahead and spot anything unusual — a large charge, a spike on one date, a subscription about to hit its maximum cycles.

Renewal reminders

Shoppers dislike surprise charges, and a surprise charge is a chargeback risk. Turn on the renewal reminder under Notifications to email customers a few days before each charge, with a link to the portal if they want to change anything.

Some jurisdictions require advance notice for recurring charges. Check what applies to you.

Taxes, shipping and discounts

All of these are Shopify's, applied at charge time by Shopify's own rules:

• Tax is calculated by Shopify using your tax settings and the delivery address
• Shipping uses your store's shipping rules — the same rates a one-off order would get
• Discount codes applied at the original checkout do not automatically recur. A recurring discount belongs in the plan's pricing rule, not in a code.

Pausing and resuming

A paused subscription is not charged. Resuming schedules the next charge on the plan's cadence from the resume date — a customer who pauses for two months does not come back to two months of arrears.

What we cannot do

We cannot charge a customer, because we hold no payment instrument. Every charge is made by Shopify against a method Shopify vaulted. There is no path by which a bug on our side takes money it should not, and no way for us to retry a charge outside Shopify's own retry rules.