Subscriptions
Introduction
A subscription business model allows customers to subscribe to your products and be charged a recurring fee—usually monthly or yearly. The subscription business model is defined within the CMS in Content Model. You can populate subscription information for a product through the Subscription attribute in the Contentful or Sanity Product content model.
Emails
You can set up subscription email reminders several days before the next installments are shipped, allowing your customers to make any adjustments to the order before it is processed.
These emails templates found in your CMS are:
- Default reminder
- Last chance reminder

Environment Variables
The OMS contains two environment variables that determine when reminders are sent:
- SUBSCRIPTION_DEFAULT_REMINDER_DAYS
- SUBSCRIPTION_LAST_CHANCE_REMINDER_DAYS
The OMS computes when a reminder should be sent based on the Subscription's actionable date and the value provided in these Environment Variables.

FAQ and Troubleshooting
Q: What are the statuses of a Subscription?
- Active: Subscription is Operational
- Pending Cancelation
- Canceled: Your subscription has been canceled.
- Inactive: Subscription is not currently active.
Q: What are the Processing States of a Subscription? New: Your subscription is being processed. When payment is processed, the processing state will update to Success. Failure: your Subscription has failed. Check the Installment tab and see if your Subscription is fulfilled. More often than not, a failed subscription is due to a payment issue. Expired credit cards are often the case. Success: Payment is successful, and your subscription is ready to be fulfilled
Q: Can I edit an Active Subscription? Yes, you can edit your subscription whenever you like. Navigate to your Subscription's page and make your edit/update as described above. Q: Can I pause a subscription? Yes, there are components in our SDK that allow you to provide your customers with the ability to Pause a Subscription in the front end, and you can also Pause it from within the OMS on behalf of your customers. Q: Can I delete a subscription? We do recommend that you mark your Subscription as Cancelled. You can click the Cancel icon next to the Subscription you'd like to end/delete on your Subscription page. Your customers can also end their Subscription in the front end, in My Account. Q: Can I create a Subscription from within the OMS? Yes, you can manually create a subscription in your OMS - Navigate to Subscriptions, click New Subscription, and refer to the OMS section in this guide. Q: If I modify an existing Subscription in the OMS, will the customer see the change in their Account? Yes, you can edit the address, the dates, products, Payment, and more on your Subscription page. Q: Can I change the products in an active subscription? Yes, you can. You can scroll down to the Line items section and modify them there. Q: What is an Actionable Date? The Actionable Date is when your Subscription will start. Q: Can I update an address to a subscription? Yes, if you need to change billing or shipping addresses, you can do so on the Subscription page. Q: Can I change the method of Payment in a subscription? You can direct customers to update their credit cards on the Subscription page in My Account, or if they have placed an order with that same payment method, you can do it in the OMS on the Subscription page in the Payment section. Q: Will my customers receive an email reminding them of an upcoming subscription? Yes, Chord provides email template reminders in your CMS under Transactional Emails. There are some Environment Variables configurations in Settings --> Store. For more information, please refer to Environment Variables document under the Transactional Emails section. As described in the Emails section of this document, you can select to send your customers reminders. You can specify to send the reminder based on the days before the subscription actionable date.
Q: How are the reminder emails being calculated and sent?
We have a method in place that generates and sends your customers these reminders. They are based on the value you have provided in the Environment Variables and the Actionable Date of subscription orders.
That method is triggered in three places:
- When the Subscription is created (' activated').
- When the actionable date is advanced.
- When a subscription is paused.
Q: Some of our subscriptions have not shipped, and we see Processing State "Failure" and Shipping State of "Address" what causes this? More often than not, when a subscription fails, it is due to a failed payment, such as an expired credit card or even no funds available. We also suggest looking at the inventory since an Out Of Stock product will stop a subscription order from shipping.
Q: We do not want subscription shipments to be inventory dependent, and having OOS products to stop subscriptions from shipping. What do you recommend?
We suggest having backorder setting turned ON. For more information about backorder, click on the link.
Suppose backorder is not an option you want to use. In that case, you can configure a subscription type to fulfill the order with a different variant if the scheduled variant is not available/error. So if Product B is out of stock, fulfill it with Product A. For more information about Subscription Type, please refer to this document