Shopify Selling Plans

Ordergroove creates and manages the Shopify selling plans that make your products available as subscriptions.

This article will take you through what a selling plan is, what Ordergroove puts in them, what to check if you use selling plan information elsewhere on your store, and how your subscription discounts interact with them.

Manage subscription eligibility in Ordergroove, not Shopify

Ordergroove tracks eligibility at the variant level. Assigning selling plans at the parent product level in Shopify breaks the association between those selling plans and Ordergroove, and can prevent subscription orders from being placed. Even when an Ordergroove selling plan appears in that list, adding or removing it there will not be reflected in Ordergroove.

Take a look at Handling Shopify product variants for more information.

Ordergroove manages your selling plans

Ordergroove creates your selling plans and keeps them up to date as your subscription program changes. That includes the plan names your customers see when they choose a subscription.

What's in your selling plans can change for two reasons. You might change them — by setting an Incentives Builder offer profile live, changing your delivery frequencies or incentives, or changing which products are subscription eligible. We might also change them, either as the Ordergroove platform develops or when we move your store to Incentives Builder on your behalf.

What is a selling plan

A selling plan is a Shopify object that represents an alternative way to buy a product, such as a subscription or a prepaid subscription. Selling plans sit inside a selling plan group, and that group is attached to your products.

The structure is:

• Many products are attached to one selling plan group, such as Subscribe and Save.
• That group contains many selling plans — one for each delivery frequency you offer.

A store offering deliveries every 1, 2, 3, and 6 months has a selling plan group containing four selling plans. Each plan describes one of the purchase options a customer can choose from on your storefront.

A selling plan can also carry a price adjustment. This is a discount stored on the plan itself, which Shopify applies when a customer chooses that option. Whether your selling plans carry one depends on how your promotions are set up — take a look at How your subscription discounts are applied below.

Note: Prepaid subscriptions are the exception to this structure. Take a look at Prepaid subscriptions below.

Take a look at Shopify's Selling plans documentation for more information.

What Ordergroove creates and manages

When you install Ordergroove and sync your products, we create your selling plan group and its selling plans, and keep them up to date as your program changes.

Every product marked as subscription eligible in Ordergroove displays its selling plans on that product's page in your Shopify admin, under a merchant code such as ordergroove-subscribe-and-save.

Ordergroove is responsible for:

• Creating the selling plan group and attaching it to every product that's eligible for subscription in Ordergroove.
• Creating a selling plan for each delivery frequency you've configured.
• Creating separate selling plan groups and selling plans for prepaid subscriptions, where you offer them.
• Naming each plan based on its frequency, for example Delivered every 2 months.
• Applying a price adjustment to the selling plan, if your promotions were configured by Ordergroove Solutions or through the legacy RC3 incentives configurator.
• Keeping them in sync when you add products, change frequencies, or change your incentives.

Note: Changes you make to these objects directly in Shopify are not retained, and in some cases they cause errors. Take a look at Manage subscription eligibility in Ordergroove, not Shopify above.

What happens after checkout

A selling plan's job is to indicate during checkout that the customer chose a subscription option for that product. Once checkout completes, Shopify uses that information to generate a subscription contract. From that point forward all subscription information is tied to the contract, not to the selling plan.

This means editing a selling plan afterwards does not rewrite contracts that already exist.

Prepaid subscriptions

Prepaid selling plans are built differently from the rest of your selling plans, and they work the same way whether Ordergroove Solutions configured your promotions or you use Incentives Builder. Moving to Incentives Builder does not change how your prepaid selling plans work.

Three things set them apart:

Every prepaid product gets its own selling plan group

Your standard subscription products share a single selling plan group. Prepaid doesn't work that way. Ordergroove creates a separate selling plan group for every product you offer as a prepaid subscription, so a store with 5,000 prepaid-eligible products has 5,000 prepaid selling plan groups.

Each group contains a plan for each prepaid term

Within each of those groups, Ordergroove creates a selling plan for every prepaid term a customer can buy. If your customers can prepay for 1, 3, or 6 deliveries, that product's group contains three selling plans.

The price adjustment sets the price rather than discounting it

This is the most important difference. On a standard subscription plan, the price adjustment takes a percentage or an amount off the product price. On a prepaid plan it overrides the price outright: the plan carries the full prepaid price for that term.

This is why every product needs its own prepaid selling plans. The prices are specific to that product, so they can't be shared across your catalogue the way a percentage discount can.

Note: Prepaid selling plans sync to Shopify through their own flow, separate from your standard plans. Because there are many more of them, prepaid syncs take longer to complete.

If you use selling plan information elsewhere

Some merchants read information from Ordergroove's selling plans to power other parts of their store. Review those integrations before an Incentives Builder offer profile goes live on your store, and whenever your subscription program changes.

The most common cases:

• Custom and headless storefronts. A product page that reads the discount from price_adjustments to show a subscription price or savings badge will not find it there, and will usually fall back to showing the full price. Depending on how the page was built, it may instead show the wrong number or stop loading.
• Third-party cart and upsell apps. Apps such as Rebuy can be configured to read the discount from the selling plan in order to display it, for example a frequency dropdown labelled Subscribe and Save 10%. If an Incentives Builder profile goes live, the price adjustment is removed from the selling plan and that label shows an incorrect value or nothing at all.
• Anything that reads the plan name as text. Selling plan names are generated by Ordergroove and the wording changes. If a script, translation file, or report pulls the discount or the frequency out of the name, we'd recommend finding another source for it.

How your subscription discounts are applied

How Ordergroove applies your discounts depends on how your promotions were set up. If you're not sure which applies to you, the question to ask is: did I build my promotions myself in Incentives Builder, or were they configured for me?

The difference matters here, because it determines whether your discount is stored on the selling plan as a price adjustment.

If your promotions were configured for you

This covers promotions set up by Ordergroove Solutions, and promotions you set up yourself through the legacy RC3 incentives configurator before Incentives Builder existed. Both work the same way.

Your initial order incentive is applied through the selling plan itself, using a Shopify price adjustment. The adjustment is either a percentage off or a set amount off.

The discount is also written into the selling plan name, so a plan reads Delivered every 2 months. Get 15% off today and all future orders.

If this describes your store, your selling plans are working as they always have. The rest of this section applies when you move to Incentives Builder.

If you use Incentives Builder

A selling plan can only hold one discount for the first order and one for every order after it, and it applies them the same way to every product and every customer. Flex Incentives are more flexible than that: your discount can change based on the product, the order number, what else is in the cart, and other conditions. A selling plan can only ever describe part of an offer like that.

When a selling plan held a discount that didn't match your full offer, customers and storefronts saw an inaccurate price, and in some cases the discount stacked with others in ways you didn't intend. So we moved the discount off the selling plan. Discounts now apply through Shopify's own discount system at checkout, based on what's actually in the cart, and each recurring order is calculated at the time it's placed.

The first time an offer profile created in Incentives Builder goes live on your store, three things change:

• Discount text is removed from your selling plan names. The name above becomes Delivered every 2 months.
• The price adjustment associated with the selling plan is removed, and price_adjustments is empty.
• Your initial order incentive is applied by a Shopify discount function instead, and shown to shoppers in cart and checkout.

Your customers still receive the discounts you've configured, and you can still run a single program-wide discount if that's what suits your program. What changes is where that information is stored in Shopify, and where it appears on your storefront.

Important: Setting an offer profile live does change the recurring incentives applied to future orders, including for customers who are already subscribed. Review your recurring incentive before you set it live.

Where your discount appears instead

Your savings are shown to shoppers on the discount line in cart and checkout. On Shopify Plus you can add further item-level and order-level messaging to your checkout page. Take a look at Display Recurring Benefits and Upsell to Subscriptions With Shopify Checkout to set that up.

Note: Shopify calculates its own Recurring subtotal and assumes the customer will pay today's price on every future order. Ordergroove can't override that number. Where your recurring discount differs from your first order discount, this line will be inaccurate, and the same figure appears in order details and order confirmation emails. Customers are still charged correctly. Our Shopify Platform FAQ covers how to replace that wording where Shopify allows it — Shopify has recently limited how much of this text stores can change, so it may not be available on your checkout.

Before you move to Incentives Builder

Does this affect my store?

It affects you if your product pages, cart, or any other part of your storefront reads the discount from Shopify's selling plan data rather than from Ordergroove. This is most common on headless storefronts and custom themes.

In Shopify's Liquid objects, the fields involved are selling_plan_group, selling_plans, and the price_adjustments object inside them. If you're not sure, ask your developer whether anything on your site reads price_adjustments from a selling plan.

Most merchants are not affected. If you use a standard Shopify theme with Ordergroove's offer widget, your displayed prices come from Ordergroove and nothing changes.

What to do first

Important Notes:

• Ask your developer to confirm whether your storefront reads price_adjustments or the selling plan name anywhere.
• If it does, agree on an approach before an Incentives Builder offer profile goes live. Your developer has two options: store your subscription discount in your own storefront settings and use it to work out the subscription price, which is simpler but has to be updated by hand whenever you change your discount in Ordergroove; or read your live discount from Ordergroove, which stays in sync on its own but takes more work to build.
• Tell your Ordergroove contact that you have custom storefront work that reads selling plan data. This applies even if you're not planning the move yourself — if Ordergroove Solutions moves your store to Incentives Builder on your behalf, the same change happens.

Take a look at If you use selling plan information elsewhere below for the other places this can surface.

FAQ

Will my existing subscribers be affected?

Their subscriptions will not be cancelled or rebuilt, as those live in Shopify subscription contracts that are independent of the selling plan. The recurring incentive you set live does apply to their future orders, so review it first.

Can Ordergroove put the discount back on the selling plan?

No. A selling plan can only hold one first order value and one recurring value, applied the same way to every product and customer, so it can't represent most of the offers Flex Incentives supports. Storing a discount there that doesn't match your real offer is what produced inaccurate prices and unintended discount stacking in the first place.

If your storefront needs the subscription price before checkout, take a look at Before you move to Incentives Builder for the two supported approaches.

How do I move an existing promotion to Incentives Builder?

We recommend creating a new offer profile in Incentives Builder rather than editing your existing one. In some cases an existing profile can be converted — if the only thing you've set is a program-wide discount — but creating a new profile is simpler, particularly if you have existing subscribers on the current one.

Can I edit my selling plan names?

Selling plan name customization is currently available through our Early Access program. Reach out to your Ordergroove CSM if you'd like it enabled for your store.

Without it, selling plan names are generated by Ordergroove, and changes made directly in Shopify are not retained.

Why did the discount disappear from my selling plan name?

Ordergroove now applies your initial order incentive through a Shopify discount function rather than through the selling plan, so the discount is no longer written into the name. Your customers still receive their full discount. It's shown on the discount line in cart and checkout instead.

I haven't set up Incentives Builder yet. Do I need to do anything?

Not yet — but read Before you move to Incentives Builder above before you do, or before you ask Ordergroove to move you. Until then your selling plans continue to work as they do today.

Does moving to Incentives Builder change my prepaid subscriptions?

No. Prepaid selling plans work the same way regardless of how your promotions are configured. Take a look at Prepaid subscriptions for how they work.