Going Live with Skio

Outline

• Overview
• Before Going Live
• Going Live
• After Going Live

Overview

Merchants often have questions about the best practices and pitfalls to be aware of when going live with Skio. This document explains the typical steps that Skio Launch Engineers take when going live with Skio and addresses some common questions from merchants around this topic.

Before Going Live

After the Skio Plan Picker has been integrated on your store's product pages in the "Integration Steps" [link to integration guide], there are a few recommended checks to perform before publishing the Skio changes to your live store.

Add-To-Cart Functionality

Try adding both a one-time and subscription product to cart from the Product page. You should see that the selected selling plan is being applied to the subscription in your cart via additional copy in the Checkout flow (i.e. "Every 1 Month").

Variant Switching

If your store contains products with variants (i.e. color options, size options), make sure that the "Add to cart" button on the Product page adds the correct variant to cart after toggling between different variant options. Additionally, please confirm that the price displayed in the Skio Plan Picker changes as the variant is changed (if the variants have different pricing).

Access to Skio Customer Portal

Ensure that customers have access to the Skio Customer Portal so that they can manage their subscriptions. The Skio Customer Portal is located at your store's home URL + "/a/account/login".

If you have not yet added access to the Skio Customer Portal, check out this helpful article on the different methods of directing users to the Skio Customer Portal!

Purchase a Test Subscription (optional)

Sometimes, merchants may want to place a test subscription order in order to view the user-flow for purchasing a subscription, as well as test the functionality for managing their subscription within the Skio Customer Portal. While this is not required, placing a test order allows you to test the entire user-flow and ensure that you understand what the steps in the process are for your customers.

If you do wish to place a test order, the recommended approach is to place a subscription order on your Skio preview theme exactly as a customer would, and proceed through the Shopify Checkout. Once the order has been placed via the Shopify Checkout, you can go into your store's "Orders" page to cancel/refund the order you placed; this will create a subscription record in Skio that can be used for testing. With the subscription record created, you can now log in to the Skio Customer Portal with the email that was used to place the order. At this point, you will be able to view and test the Skio Customer Portal exactly as a customer would! Once you are done testing, please remember to cancel your subscription in the Skio Customer Portal (otherwise you will be billed in the future as a subscriber would be)!

Review Onboarding Guide/Notifications

Last, it is always a good idea to review the Skio Onboarding Guides to ensure that everything related to Notifications / Klaviyo / Cancel flow / Dunning / etc has been set up as needed!

Going Live

Once you have performed the checks mentioned above and you are ready to start selling subscriptions, it is time to go live with Skio! There are 3 typical cases when going live:

Publish the "Skio" Theme Directly

A typical work flow for integrating Skio involves duplicating the current live theme and making the Skio-related changes in the duplicate theme. If no changes were made to the live theme while the Skio-related changes were made, you can simply publish the Skio theme without worrying about overwriting any changes to the live theme!

Manually merge the "Skio" Theme Changes into the Live Theme

Sometimes, after the live theme has been duplicated and the Skio-related changes have been made in the duplicate theme, it is not possible to publish the Skio theme directly because changes have been made to the live theme that would be overwritten.

In this case, Skio Launch Engineers typically use the Shopify CLI commands for themes as outlined below, however this can be done by any developer:

• Pull the current live theme from Shopify
• Git init, git add, and git commit to save the changes
• Pull the Skio theme from Shopify
• Revert any code where the recent changes to the live theme were overwritten
• Git commit to save changes
• Push the updated code to the Skio theme and check that everything is working as expected
• Finally, publish the Skio theme which now includes the recent changes to the live theme

Merge the "Skio" Theme Changes Using Github

If you have Github set up to track changes on your Shopify store, the Launch team probably already made the Skio-related changes on a "skio" branch. In this case, simply merge the "skio" branch into your "main" branch (or whichever branch your live theme is currently referencing) and you should be good to go!

After Going Live

Once your Skio changes have been published, there are a few things to check immediately to ensure that everything is working as expected, as well as a few things to keep an eye out for in the next few days.

Double Check Functionality of Published Skio Theme

Even though you likely checked these things before going live, it never hurts to check again after publishing:

• Add-to-cart works for one-time and subscription purchases on the Product page
• Variant switching works on the Product page
• Customers are able to access the Skio Customer Portal

Subscriptions Are Created in Skio

While it is not likely that subscriptions will be purchased immediately after publishing, it is good to check the Skio Dashboard for a few days after publishing to ensure that new subscriptions are being created and flowing into Skio properly.

Along the same lines, if you are migrating to Skio from another subscription app, it is good to check that no new orders are being created in that app for the next few days; it is okay for recurring orders to continue to process prior to the data migration to Skio. If new orders are being placed in your old subscription app, you should investigate to see where these orders are coming from. You might need to deactivate plugins in your old subscription app or remove references to the old app from the theme codebase. If you cannot determine how the new orders are being placed in your old subscription app, be sure to reach out to the Skio Launch team to let them know.

Perform Data Migration

If you are migrating from another subscription app, check out this guide on migrating to Skio. Please note that you should wait a few days between publishing and migration to ensure that everything is flowing into Skio as expected.

Congratulations on going live with Skio, and welcome to the Skio family! 🎉