Subscriptions and contracts
Every subscriber in your dashboard corresponds to a subscription contract on your Shopify store. The contract is the authoritative record; our view mirrors it.
Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active | Billing normally. Will be charged on the next due date. |
| Past due | A payment failed. We are retrying — see Failed payments. |
| Paused | Deliberately stopped. No charges until resumed. |
| Pending authorisation | Has no payment method yet. Never charged. Usually a migrated subscription. |
| Cancelled | Ended. Kept for your records and reporting. |
Pending authorisation is the one worth understanding. Shopify will report a contract as active even when no payment method is attached to it, which would put a migrated subscriber into dunning for a card nobody ever gave. We hold any contract with no payment method in this status instead, and the billing process only ever looks at active and past due. A pending subscription becomes active by itself the moment its owner adds a payment method.
What you can do from the dashboard
Open a subscriber to see their contract, their delivery schedule, their charge history and the orders each charge produced. From there you can:
- Skip the next delivery (not available on prepaid)
- Change the next charge date
- Pause and resume
- Edit quantity or swap the product
- Cancel
Every change is written back to the Shopify contract and recorded in an audit log with who did it and when.
Charge history
Each subscription lists its cycles: the date, the amount, the outcome and the Shopify order. The order placed at checkout is recorded as charge 1 — the subscription's first payment is the one the customer made when they subscribed, not a later renewal.
When a subscription is missing
Contracts reach us by webhook. Webhooks occasionally fail to arrive — a deploy at the wrong moment, a network blip at Shopify's end.
A reconciliation job runs daily: it pages through your contracts at Shopify, compares them with ours, and pulls in anything missing. So a dropped webhook delays a subscription appearing; it does not lose it.
If something is missing and you do not want to wait, use Settings → Sync now.
Cancelling on the customer's behalf
Cancelling from the dashboard ends the contract at Shopify immediately, so no further charge can occur. It does not refund the most recent charge — issue that from Shopify admin as you would for any order.
If the customer is within a minimum cycle commitment, the dashboard lets you override it. The commitment is enforced against the customer in the portal, not against you.