Shopify Subscription APIs are here. Now, It’s no more- ‘oh, it is convenient for customers, but not for me.’ It is a fact that subscribers tend to be more loyal customers, which gives you a significant recurring revenue stream every month. 

For Shopify merchants, Shopify subscription APIs  are the most promising ways to maximize the power of recurring billing and subscriptions on the Shopify checkout without the extra burden of managing a third-party app. Although you are unable to take advantage of some of the critical features of subscription apps, Shopify subscription APIs help build a great subscription experience, allowing you to sell both one-time products and recurring subscriptions. There is so much more we can do with recurring orders and subscription management in the checkout and build a thriving business. Here are five exciting ways to cash in on the Shopify subscription APIs.  

Sell beyond ‘buy now’

Shopify’s default “buy now button” helps you merchandise your products through captivating promotions, site-wide ads, and highlights of well-stocked products. ‘Buy Now’ can be more encouraging to offer a friction-free checkout experience and give your customers access to direct purchases. 

However, one-time products often cannot move beyond window shopping stature as consumers face decision fatigue or don’t want to spend immediately. This can have a direct impact on your customers not revisiting you. 

The Selling Plan API supports the scalability of subscription models, giving you an opportunity to sell via ‘buy now’  and also apply different methods of selling product variants. 

Using the Selling Plan API, you can determine how many ways you can allow your customers to manage and buy subscriptions. You can build models such as-

  • subscribe and save
  •  prepaid 

Double the convenience. Subscribe and save model is a flexible way that does not need payment information every time a recurring order is shipped. It is an automated workflow to ease customer effort as well as merchant’s hard work. Surprisingly, it enables you to set particular intervals, so that it does not feel a burden to a customer yet brings substantial recurring revenue. 

Prepaid makes payment a priority. Customers need to pay upfront to avail their recurring orders. 

Any model you can choose for your recurring orders with the flexibility of delivery and pricing features. For delivery, you can set weekly or monthly delivery along with fixed or recurring pricing for the ‘subscribe and save’ model. 

Shopify subscription API

Source: Shopify

With a prepaid subscription, your customers can be overwhelmed with payment flexibility that occurs every 12 weeks. Based on the pricing policy, you can deliver every week, every two weeks, and every three weeks with exciting offers.  

The best part, when you use this API, it does not require you to customize the checkout. 

Encourage transparency in subscription management 

Seamless subscription management involves making your subscribers aware of every step of the subscription process. Having no such technique can impact customer experience, which later adds to customer churn. 

Shopify takes care of this critical part and has developed ‘Subscription Contract API’. With webhook monitoring every subscription event, it generates a subscription contract immediately after a subscriber purchases recurring products. Subscription Contract API keeps every information handy about the type of plan, length of period, costs of subscription, and the cancellation process. 

Providing visibility into subscription contracts helps keep track of customer churn and improves ways to build a long-term customer relationship. 

Friction-free checkout experience 

With the existing Shopify set-up, Shopify checkout can’t vault payment information, making customers perform extra efforts to manually put payment details before check out. Also, there wasn’t a single checkout to enable the one-time purchase and recurring purchases. Customers need to move between regular products and recurring orders to pay for them. Consumers tend to be fickle. If online shopping is inconvenient and inflexible, cart abandonment is highly likely, resulting in a decline in conversions. 

Now, Shopify merchants can have the flexibility to incorporate friction-free checkout procedures. The Customer Payment Method API easily allows merchants to vault card details and helps customers buy both one-time and recurring products with ease. In this way, merchants also don’t need any third-party subscription app to vault payment data for future recurring charges. 

Leverage marketing opportunities 

Shopify is a scalable platform that best suits small-scale businesses, which means merchants with limited budgets can have the power to reach customers and sell online.

Shopify Subscription APIs do not only make selling online easy, but also give its merchants more ways to increase sales through recurring order and subscription management. This way, merchants can have another opportunity to access complete customer data. 

A lot of technologies like webhook, subscription contract API, and customer payment method API combine to derive customer data from the Shopify checkout. Data is key to getting complete visibility into customer behavior. Therefore, you can make use of them to build your marketing campaigns -

  • Prepare email campaigns to target customers and bring them back to your store with exciting offers and promotions. 
  • Gain upselling opportunities and personify your offers based on customer segmentation. 
  • Automated workflows can be easily implemented that helps connect with users and increase buyer confidence and trust. 
  • Get complete insights into revenue from subscriptions. It is best to improve performance for future sales. 

Migrate to Shopify Subscription API 

Are you paying extra for using a third-party subscription app? Most of the basic functionalities you get from subscription apps are available with Shopify Subscription APIs, critical to providing an excellent merchant experience. 

It is quite flexible to migrate your existing subscription system to one that natively adapts to Shopify admin. 

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ReCharge to Shopify Migration- A Complete Guide 

Make sure you don’t tamper with user experience because it decides the next successful customer journey in an affordable way. 

Shopify subscription APIs makes it easy to handle critical migration settings- 

  • You can create models to categorize selling methods
  • Implement discounts at checkout 
  • Handle discount errors if there is any
  • Manage taxes 
  • Modify theme code for better user experience

Using default ‘Shopify Payments’ earns you the ability to start your subscription business. However, you can also leverage this dynamic selling option if you use Stripe as your service provider. Migrating also helps you import customer data, payment history, and create billing. 

Shopify Subscription APIs- How They Add Value to Merchant Success 

Subscription today is transforming the way businesses were operating and scaling a few years ago. Shopify Subscription APIs make the process of subscription management affordable for merchants, cutting through the noise and enabling them to capitalize on the successful eCommerce model. 

Keen to maximize the benefits of Shopify Subscription APIs for your store? Ask HulkApps Shopify experts to do this tricky job for you. We’ve managed subscription box, replenishment, curated box, and complicated Shopify Plus projects for our customers. Get in touch with us here if you have any projects in mind.