Managing subscription orders

You can manage pay-per-delivery orders and prepaid subscription orders from your Shopify admin.

Pay-per-delivery orders have only one subscription item per order. At regular intervals, new pay-per-delivery orders are created by your subscription app, and are displayed on your Orders list. Pay-per-delivery orders are managed and fulfilled the same as non-subscription orders.

Prepaid subscription orders are paid for with a lump sum in advance, but have multiple scheduled fulfillments over a period of time. Prepaid subscription orders display as a single order with a Scheduled status until a fulfillment date is reached. When the fulfillment date is reached, the order status updates to Unfulfilled and you can then fulfill the order. The order's status then changes back to Scheduled until the next fulfillment date is reached, and the cycle begins again. When an order has a Scheduled status, you can track the order on your Orders page, but no action is required.

On the order, you can review all items for the prepaid subscription orders, sorted into Fulfilled, Unfulfilled, and Scheduled fulfillment cards. The next scheduled fulfillment for the order is listed in the Scheduled fulfillment card. Click View all fulfillments to display all scheduled fulfillments.

Filtering and sorting your prepaid subscription orders

You can filter your Orders page by the Scheduled fulfillment status to display upcoming fulfillment work that doesn't require immediate action.

To display prepaid subscription orders that are ready to be fulfilled, filter your Orders page by the Unfulfilled status. By default, the Orders page is sorted by date. This means that prepaid subscription orders that are ready to be fulfilled might drop to the bottom of your list of unfulfilled orders. To display these orders, you can sort your Orders page by oldest date.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Orders.
2. Activate Search and filter by clicking the button with the magnifying glass and trigram icons.
3. Click Add filter +.
4. Click Fulfillment status, and then select Unfulfilled.
5. Click ⇅ to open the Sort menu.
6. Select Date and ↑ Oldest to newest.
7. Optional: Click Save as to name and save this order list view.

Editing prepaid subscription orders

You can edit an order that contains a scheduled fulfillment item to add and remove non-scheduled items, but you can't edit items with scheduled fulfillments. For example, if an order contains a subscription product and a product without a subscription, then you can edit the product without a subscription but you can't edit the subscription product.

You can't duplicate a prepaid subscription order.

Canceling and refunding prepaid subscription orders

You can cancel a prepaid subscription order that has not yet been fulfilled. If any scheduled items have been fulfilled, then you can't cancel the order, but you can issue full and partial refunds for fulfilled and scheduled items.

If your customer cancels an order, then you might still need to refund the order manually. A message displays on an order when this happens.

When you refund an order from the Orders page, you might need to cancel the order in your subscription app as well.

Reserving inventory

Inventory for each prepaid subscription order cycle is reserved when the fulfillment date is reached. The inventory for the entire subscription order isn't reserved when the order is created. To reserve inventory for a scheduled fulfillment before the fulfillment date, you can fulfill a scheduled order early.

Fulfilling subscription orders

Fulfillments on subscription orders can be split up in a single order based on a product's fulfillment location or shipping profile.

Fulfilling a prepaid subscription order

When a scheduled order reaches its fulfillment date, the status of the order updates to Unfulfilled and you can fulfill the order.

Fulfilling a prepaid subscription order early

You can't reschedule scheduled fulfillments, but you can choose to fulfill an order early.

Steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, click Orders.
2. Select the order that you want to fulfill early.
3. In the Scheduled section, click Fulfill early.
4. Review the order fulfillment information, and then click Mark as unfulfilled. The order status is updated to Unfulfilled and you can fulfill the items.