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.





Subscription CMS setup

Contentful



Content Model



The Subscription attribute allows you to enter the following information associated with a subscription:

• Name
• Slug
• Presentation
• Discount Percentage
• Intervals

Navigate to Content Model and click Add Content Type

Type in Subscription and click Create





Click Add field and select Text . Type in Name and select Short Text Click Create and Configure and select This field represents the Entry title





Click Confirm Click Add field again and select Text--> Short Text for Slug and click Create Repeat for Presentation, Discount Percentage and Intervals, Prepaid Subscription, Gift Subscription and Max Installments as seen below







Now that the Subscription attribute is created, let's create the Subscription Interval

Click Add Content Type, in the Name field type in Subscription Interval and Create.

Click Add field and select Text . Type in Name and select Short Text Click Create and Configure and select This field represents the Entry title

Add the other following fields as represented below









When creating a Unit, ensure that your Validation tab is selected as such.









Content Type



After creating your Content Model, you need to create a Content Type that will define what your customers will see in your store.

Click Content and click Add Entry and select Subscription Intervals





You are ready to create the intervals you'd like to offer your customers.

Type in the Interval Name associated to the Unit you want to create

Repeat for all Units









If you want to provide an automatic saving to your customers when they select monthly Subscriptions you can create a Content Type of Subscription here.

Click Add Entry and select Subscription

We assume you want to create a Subscribe and Save 15% based on Monthly Subscriptions

Publish when you are ready to test it on Staging or Production





The above is introductory help; please ask your developer/agency partner to help you build Subscription Types and Intervals.



Sanity



Content Model



As described above, for Contentful, when using Sanity, you must create Subscription and Subscription Intervals in the Content Model.



Unlike Contentful, in Sanity Studio, defining your content models with code is by design. It makes it easier to version control and puts you and your developers in control. So you decide precisely how the data structures should be. Ask your developer or your agency to create it.

A good way to start is described here.



OMS

The OMS syncs with Contentful and Sanity. Once a product is marked subscribable, you will see the product set to “Subscribable” in the OMS. Navigate to the Product page and notice the Subscribable checkbox. When left unchecked, the product is not available for Subscription.







Checkout

Now that your products have been synced and marked as subscribable, your customers can create a subscription order on your site. 

Customers can checkout with a one-time purchase AND a subscription in their cart. 



Please check with your developer or agency partner to design a site that fits your needs











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:

1. SUBSCRIPTION_DEFAULT_REMINDER_DAYS
2. 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