Many merchants want to incentivize customers to sign up for a new subscription. One common way to do that is to offer a discount on the first purchase to create the subscription. We call this the Initial Offer Incentive, or IOI for short.
With this feature, you can offer customers a percentage discount or dollar amount off the purchase of a subscription through your website.
Note: Initial Offer Incentives can only be managed from Ordergroove by Shopify merchants using Shopify Payments. If you are not using Shopify Payments, use our example Shopify Script to customize your IOI.
How to set an IOI
When you log into Ordergroove, click on Promotions from the left navigation menu. You should see an option for Initial Offer Incentive which will be OFF by default.
Turn on the switch and you’ll be asked to set a Discount Amount and a Discount Type. In the example below, we’ve set an IOI of 5% off the customer’s first purchase. Once you're done, make sure to hit SAVE in the top right corner of the page.
Now when customers add a subscription item to their cart, they’ll see a message similar to the one below along with a discounted price (the Cube was originally priced at $10):
This discount will stack with any other promotions or discounts you might be running on your store, including any that might be added via a Shopify script.
Further Customization
If you'd like to customize your IOI beyond setting a percent amount off or a dollar amount off, we recommend using a Shopify Script (only available to merchants on Shopify Plus). You can see our example script here and use that as a starting point to customize your customer experience further.
If you do decide to use a Shopify Script, make sure to set the IOI in Ordergroove to 0% off. Otherwise, the customer will get both discounts (the discounts will stack on each other).