Prepaid subscriptions

Overview (TL;DR)

Prepaid subscriptions give subscribers the option to pay for all of their shipment upfront
Example: If a subscriber buys a 3-month subscription, they’ll pay for the full 3 months on the 1st order and then have 2 $0 shipments for month 2 and month 3
This is a great way to improve retention and lock in revenue for loyal subscribers

What is it?

Prepaid subscriptions are unique from the default subscription type and give you more flexibility and control to customize your subscription offering. Unlike a typical subscription wherein a customer pays for the order, its processed, and then shipped, prepaid subscriptions allow your customers to pay for all the shipments in an order upfront.

Here’s a good visualization on how renewals work:

Why should I use it?

Prepaid shipments are a great way to incentivize customers to pay upfront for subscription orders they already intend to buy. This results in a commitment to the subscription interval and guarantees a better retention rate while locking in the revenue on their first purchase.

If you’re wanting to get more creative, you could start to use our prepaid subscription feature as a way to facilitate a membership-style subscription program. Since subscribers would pay upfront, you could allow them to swap the product on prepaid shipments to other flavors. Instead of a standard trial pack that automatically converts to a more expensive variant, why not use prepaids to flip the script by getting customers to commit upfront for a more customized experience on subsequent orders. For example, merchants that offer daily consumable products (re: supplements) typically run into retention issues because the customer doesn’t “feel the effects” soon enough and so they cancel. With a prepaid subscription, you can set the expectation that it takes a 3 month commitment to get full results and after the first month the customer can easily swap the flavor or edit the next shipment date to better match their consumption with their order frequency.

How do I set it up?

To add a prepaid subscription product on Skio, you’ll need to go to Products → select Add Product → choose the product in the list currently available on Shopify.

For this example, here’s a Cat Stickers product on the Shopify store where we can set up our prepaid plan.

Clicking on the product will take us to the area to edit the subscription properties.

Under the area where it says “ Add prepaid subscription plan”, click it and you’ll see the following options available.

As an example, let’s say you want to offer the option for your customers to pay upfront and bill the customer every 4 weeks, but have the subscription delivered every 1 week. You can also indicate the verbiage on the option label. In this case, it reads “ 4 weeks prepaid, delivered weekly.” Click Save once you’re happy with the settings for your product. Previewing the product, you’ll see that the Prepaid option is now available on the listing:

During the checkout phase, you'll see that it notifies customers that they will be billed for the duration on their prepaid subscription:

When a prepaid order is placed from a customer, it will show the upcoming prepaid orders for the subscription within the Skio dashboard:

On Shopify's order page, it will also indicate that it's a prepaid when viewing the information on the customer's subscription.

Skipping prepaid orders

If a customer wants to skip their upcoming order, they can do so by clicking on the Skip button within their dashboard. It’ll prompt a message indicating to confirm the delay of the next delivery date:

When this happens, the page will now be updated to reflect the next upcoming order and an updated list of dates for the schedule. In this example, the next charge date for the prepaid subscription will be on May 5. The upcoming orders in the renewal period have now shifted over to a later week:

Creating a prepaid subscription when a product has multiple variants

If you have a product that has variants, you can also choose to have certain variants to be set up for prepaid subscription plans.