Documentation

Overview

BestWebby lets you turn any priced product into a Subscribe & Save offer. 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

A product can be offered as a subscription as long as it has a price. On a product's page, the storefront shows a subscription option alongside the standard "buy once" purchase. Shoppers choose their delivery cadence at subscribe time:

• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly (every 3 months)

The price the shopper subscribes at is the product's price at that moment, saved onto the subscription. 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 creates (or reuses) a Stripe customer for the shopper on your account and opens a secure card-entry form. 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 vs. first charge. Recurring billing starts one interval after signup. The shopper's initial delivery is handled as part of their signup — the subscription's recurring charges begin at the next period boundary.

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
• 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

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 your base currency. Each renewal is charged and booked in your store's configured base currency — the same currency your regular checkout uses.
• 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? Contact [email protected] or visit the FAQ at /faq.