Subscriptions & Subscribe-and-Save

Overview

BestWebby lets you offer a product as a Subscribe & Save subscription. When a shopper subscribes, their card is securely saved (vaulted) on your own connected Stripe account, and BestWebby's renewal engine charges that saved card once per billing period. Because the charge runs directly on your Stripe account, settlement goes straight to you — BestWebby is never in the money path and takes no percentage of the sale.

You set the terms. The shopper opts in. From there, everything that happens — each renewal charge, every pause, skip, swap, and cancellation — is logged, so you always have a clear record of what was billed and why.

This page covers:

• Enabling Subscribe & Save on a product
• How the card gets saved and charged each period
• What shoppers can do in their self-serve portal
• The dashboard view: MRR, active subscribers, and churn
• What happens when a payment fails (dunning)
• Tips and gotchas

Before you start

You need an active Stripe connection under Settings → Payments. Subscriptions ride on the same connected account as your regular checkout, so if you can already take card payments, you're ready. If Stripe isn't connected, the subscribe option won't be offered to shoppers.

Step 1: Enable Subscribe & Save on a product

Open the product, go to Lifecycle, gift wrap, returns and tick Enable Subscribe & Save, then save. The box is there for physical products. The product's page then shows a Subscribe box beside the usual purchase, as long as:

• the product has no options (sizes, colours and the like), because a subscription is for one item;
• it is your own stock, not a partner (Network Search) item, gift card or affiliate link;
• your plan includes subscriptions (Growth and above), and your store can take card payments;
• the storefront charges in your store currency (Settings → Currency). A storefront set to another currency offers no Subscribe box, and a shopper there cannot swap either.

Shoppers choose how often at subscribe time:

• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly (every 3 months)

The price the shopper subscribes at is the product's price on that storefront at that moment, saved onto the subscription together with the storefront and its currency. If you later change the product's price, existing subscriptions keep the price they signed up at until you swap them (or the shopper swaps to a different product).

Step 2: How the card is saved and charged

When a shopper subscribes, BestWebby runs a two-step vaulting flow on your connected Stripe account:

1. Save the card. BestWebby opens a secure card-entry form on your account. A shopper signed in to your store uses their own Stripe customer there; a shopper subscribing as a guest with a new email address gets a Stripe customer for that subscription alone. The card is confirmed for off-session use — meaning it can be charged later without the shopper being present — and the subscription is held as setup pending until the card is confirmed.
2. Activate. Once the card is confirmed, the subscription becomes active and BestWebby schedules the next charge one interval out.

From then on, the renewal engine runs on a timer. On each pass it finds every active subscription that's due, charges the saved card off-session on your connected account, and — on success — creates a recurring order (marked paid and moved into processing), records the payment, and advances the next charge date by one interval.

First delivery and first charge. Nothing is charged and no order is made at sign-up. The first charge, and the first order to ship, come one interval later; the Subscribe box tells the shopper the date. Each renewal after that is one interval apart.

An email that already has an account needs that account. If someone who is not signed in, or is signed in as someone else, subscribes with an email address that already belongs to one of your customers, the subscription is refused and the box offers Email me a sign-in link. Once they sign in, they can subscribe. A guest subscribing with a new address gets a customer account for it when the card is confirmed. This keeps another person's subscription, and their card, out of a customer's account.

No double-charges. Each billing period has a stable idempotency key, so an overlapping timer pass or a retry can never bill the same period twice.

Step 3: The shopper self-serve portal

Signed-in shoppers manage their own subscriptions at /account/subscriptions on your storefront. Everything they do is scoped to their own account, and each action is logged. From the portal a shopper can:

• Skip next — push the next charge out by one interval without being billed
• Pause — stop charges indefinitely; resume any time to continue deliveries
• Resume — reactivate a paused subscription (if the old date has passed, the next charge is set one interval out, so they're not immediately back-billed)
• Swap — switch to a different subscribable product at the same cadence; the next charge is re-priced to the new product automatically, at the price on the storefront they swap on (which then becomes the subscription's storefront)
• Update / add card — enter a new card through a secure form; the old card is detached
• Cancel — stop all future charges; the saved card is detached

Cancellation is final for that subscription — a cancelled subscription can't be reactivated, so the shopper would subscribe again to restart.

Step 4: The dashboard view

Go to Subscriptions in your dashboard to see your recurring-revenue picture at a glance:

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) — every active subscription normalized to a monthly figure, so weekly and quarterly plans are counted fairly rather than over- or under-stated
• Active subscribers
• Total subscriptions
• Churned this month — subscriptions cancelled since the start of the current month

Each row shows the Storefront the customer subscribed on, and the price in the currency they agreed to. Subscriptions started before storefronts were recorded, or on a storefront you have since deleted, show a dash. A renewal that is held shows Renewal on hold under its status, with the reason.

You can filter the list by status (all, active, paused, cancelled) and, from the same screen, pause, resume, or cancel any subscription. These merchant actions require the finance permission, and each one is written to your audit log.

Step 5: What happens when a payment fails (dunning)

If a renewal charge is declined, BestWebby doesn't give up immediately and it doesn't silently cancel the subscription. It follows a fixed retry schedule:

1. The charge is retried after 1 day, then 3 days, then 5 days.
2. On each failure, the shopper is emailed a notice with a link to update their card.
3. After the final attempt the subscription is paused — not cancelled — so it's fully recoverable.

When the shopper updates their card from the portal, a paused-from-dunning subscription is reactivated and a retry is scheduled right away. Every failure, pause, and recovery is recorded in your audit log, and each successful renewal writes a payment and a financial record so your books tie out.

Tips

• Point shoppers to the portal. The /account/subscriptions page handles skip, pause, swap, card updates, and cancellation without a support ticket. Linking to it from order emails and the account menu cuts inbound requests.
• Use swap for "same cadence, different flavor." Swap keeps the interval and re-prices to the new product, which is ideal for variety subscriptions or upgrades.
• Watch churned-this-month next to MRR. Reading them together tells you whether growth is net-positive for the period.

Gotchas

• Stripe must be connected. With no active Stripe connection, the subscribe option isn't offered and existing renewals can't charge. Keep your Stripe connection healthy.
• Renewals are charged in the money the customer agreed to. Each renewal is charged and booked in the currency of the storefront the customer subscribed on, and only while that is your store currency. Nothing is ever converted. If that storefront is later set to another currency, its renewals are held (nothing charged, Renewal on hold on Subscriptions, a notice at most once a day) and charged at the next check, within six hours, once it charges in your store currency again. Other storefronts do not affect it. A subscription agreed in a currency that is no longer your store currency stays on hold: cancel it and ask the customer to subscribe again.
• Older subscriptions have no storefront on record. For those, a renewal is held while the product is on any storefront that charges in another currency than your store's, because the subscription cannot say where it was started.
• Simple vs. variant products on renewal. For a simple, inventory-tracked product, a renewal draws its stock down (and a later cancel restocks what that renewal reserved). A specific variant isn't drawn down on renewal, so keep an eye on stock for variant subscriptions and fulfill from your on-hand counts.
• Cancel is not pause. Cancelling detaches the card and can't be undone. If a shopper only wants a break, use pause (or skip next) instead.
• A cancelled subscription can't be edited. Portal and dashboard actions on a cancelled subscription are rejected — the shopper subscribes anew to start again.

Questions? Get in touch or visit the FAQ at bestwebby.com/faq.