Best practices for setting up a free giveaway subscription

Before you start

Shopify requires a payment method on file for every subscription, including free ones. The recommended approach is a 100% discount code so the winner checks out at $0. No charge occurs, but the subscription is still created correctly.
Set this up on a dedicated Shopify product, separate from your regular storefront product, so the giveaway plan doesn't appear on your normal product pages.
Keep the selling plan active for the full 12 months. Deleting it while the subscription is running will break variant swapping.

How to set up a giveaway subscription

You can offer a customer a free subscription — for example, a year's worth of product delivered monthly — while letting them swap between variants like flavors or styles each month. This guide walks through the recommended setup.

Step 1: Create a separate product for the giveaway

In your Shopify admin, create a separate version of your product that will be dedicated for the giveaway
In your Skio Dashboard, go to Products > Products and select your dedicated product. Keeping it separate from your regular storefront product prevents the giveaway plan from showing up next to your normal pricing, which could make it look like any customer can get a full year for a very low price.
Add all the variants you want the winner to be able to choose between (for example, each flavor) to this product.

Step 2: Create the prepaid selling plan

Go to Products > Selling Plans and set up a prepaid selling plan on the giveaway product with these settings:

Billing interval: 12 months (charge once).
Delivery interval: 1 month (ships monthly).
Max cycles: 12 (covers all 12 monthly shipments).
Pricing policy: Set the price to $0, or leave it at full price and rely on the 100% discount code at checkout instead.

Warning: All variants you want the winner to swap between must be included on this selling plan and priced the same. Variants with a different price, or variants not added to the plan, won't appear as available options in the Customer Portal.

Step 3: Create a 100% discount code

In Shopify, create a one-time discount code for 100% off. Scope it to the giveaway product and its variants so it can't be used on anything else. Share this code privately with the winner so they can enter it at checkout and bring their order to $0.

All future monthly shipments within the prepaid term are automatically $0. No further discount codes are needed after the initial checkout.

Step 4: Enable variant swapping in the Customer Portal

Go to Storefront > Customer Portal and make sure Swap product is enabled.

In addition to the portal-level Swap product setting, each product also has its own Show in edit products page for customers toggle in Products > Products, which must be enabled for that product to be swappable in the Customer Portal.

Once swapping is enabled, the winner can:

Open their subscription in the Customer Portal.
Click Swap next to their current product.
Choose a different variant and save.

They can swap as often as they like, for any delivery within their 12-month term.

Step 5: Create the subscription for the winner

Once the plan is set up, send the winner a direct link to the giveaway product along with the discount code. They check out normally, the discount brings the total to $0, and Skio creates the subscription automatically.

You can also manually create the subscription on their behalf from the Skio Dashboard if you'd rather not send a checkout link.

Step 6: Restrict visibility (optional)

If you don't want the giveaway product to be discoverable by other customers, add a customer tag to the giveaway winner in Shopify, such as giveaway.

From your Skio dashboard, go to Products > Products, open the giveaway product's settings, and enable Customer filter. Add the customer tag from step one so that only customers with that tag will be able to see and subscribe to the product.

What happens after 12 months

Because the prepaid plan has a max cycle of 12, the subscription won't renew automatically after the 12th shipment. If the winner wants to continue, they can reactivate and will be charged at the plan's regular price.

You can also manually cancel the subscription after the 12th order if you'd rather close it out yourself.

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