Subscription orders are automatically renewed according to the schedule that the customer has chosen, eg “weekly” or “monthly”, however, if you have scheduled ordering enabled as well, you may want to align all subscription renewal dates on a particular day (e.g. have all subscriptions go through on Tuesday, ready for delivery on Wednesday). If your store has scheduled ordering and subscriptions, is set to date-only mode, and the customers' subscriptions are either weekly or fortnightly, this is set up for you automatically. All you need to do is ensure that your Minimum Wait Time is set correctly.
Usually when the subscription renews, if stock is available, an order is created and Rocketspark will attempt to charge the customer’s credit card via Stripe for the value of that order.
If the payment is successful:
- Both the customer and the merchant receive confirmation emails.
- Stock levels are adjusted.
- Any integrations such as Lightspeed or Xero are updated.
- The renewal date on the subscription advances according to the subscription frequency (eg by 1 week on a weekly subscription).
If the payment is not successful:
- The subscription is placed in “payment-hold” mode.
- Another payment attempt will be made each day for up to 5 days.
- If payment is still unsuccessful, the order is skipped and is treated as abandoned.
- The renewal date advances (eg by 1 week on a weekly subscription) and a new order will be created next time.
In most cases, the renewal date is calculated based on the date that the order was placed.
- If a weekly subscription order is placed on a Friday, it will renew the following Friday.
- If a monthly subscription order is placed on 9th May, it will renew on 9th June.
Subscriptions will always renew shortly after midnight on the renewal date. This is so that all subscription orders are processed at the same time and ready for packing first thing in the morning. So if a weekly subscription order is placed at 3 pm Friday, it will renew next Friday, in the early hours of the morning.
Subscriptions + Scheduled Ordering
The renewal date for shops that have Subscriptions + Scheduled Ordering enabled and are in “date-only” mode is equal to the Delivery/pickup day - Minimum wait time.
Subscription renewals always happen shortly after midnight on the renewal date. This only applies if the following criteria are met:
- Scheduled Ordering is enabled on the website
- The website is set to “date only” mode in-store preferences eg
- The customer’s subscription is either weekly or fortnightly (2-weekly).
Example: A butchery business does meat deliveries on Wednesdays and has a “weekly meat pack subscription” product which they deliver to customers locally. In order to be able to prepare the order and deliver on Wednesday, all orders must be placed by midday on Monday, so the merchant enters “2 days 12 hours” as the delivery minimum wait time in their Rocketspark dashboard. A customer orders a “weekly meat pack subscription” on Friday at 3:15 pm, to be delivered the following Wednesday. Normally this subscription would renew on Friday (shortly after midnight), however, in this case, the alternative logic applies because Scheduled Ordering is set to “date only” mode. In this example, the renewal date is calculated as follows:
- Start with the delivery date (end of Wednesday)
- Subtract the minimum wait time of 2 days 12 hours (equals Monday, 12pm)
- Subscriptions always renew shortly after midnight on the renewal date.
- Therefore the subscription will renew on Monday morning, shortly after midnight.
The merchant will arrive at work on Monday morning with subscription orders in their inbox ready to go, which is before their delivery cut-off time of midday. In this example, the subscription will renew 10 days after the original order was placed rather than 7 days. This allows the renewal to be better aligned with the merchant’s delivery schedule.
Manual adjustment of renewal dates
Website owners are able to manually change the renewal date of a subscription to any future date. To do this, edit the subscription, and next to the renewal date there is an edit button. Use this to select a new date that the subscription will renew on. That this will change all future renewal dates for the subscription. For example, if you change a Weekly “Wednesday” subscription to renew on a Friday, this means that the subscription will renew on Fridays from the selected date onwards.
This feature is useful in several situations
- A customer requests that their subscription renews on a different day of week or month
- You would like to have all subscriptions renewed on the same day
- A customer would like to pause a subscription until a specific date
- You need to temporarily delay some subscriptions because of stock or other issues