ZS Subscriptions guide
Everything you need to set up subscriptions on your Shopify store — from your first selling plan to recurring revenue on autopilot.
Overview
ZS Subscriptions adds recurring billing to your Shopify store. Customers can subscribe to products on your storefront, and ZS charges them automatically on schedule, recovers failed payments, and lets them manage their own plans.
The app is built on Shopify's native Subscription Contracts, which means Shopify securely handles the payment method — ZS never sees or stores a customer's card details.
Install the app
Install ZS Subscriptions from the Shopify App Store. During installation you'll be asked to approve a few permissions:
- Manage subscriptions — to create selling plans and charge renewals
- Customer access — to apply membership tags and send notifications
- Order access — to attribute renewal orders for accurate analytics
These are required for subscriptions to work. Once approved, the app opens to your dashboard.
Quick start
Four steps from install to a live subscription customers can buy.
Create a subscription rule
Go to Subscription rules → Create rule. Choose a billing frequency (for example, every 1 month), pick the products it applies to, and optionally add a subscriber discount. Save.
Add the widget to your product page
Open your theme editor, go to a product template, and add the ZS Subscription Widget block near the buy button. Save the theme.
Let customers subscribe
On the product page, customers now see a "Subscribe & save" option. When they check out, ZS creates a subscription contract automatically.
Sit back — billing runs itself
ZS charges each renewal on schedule, creates the order, and emails the customer. You watch it all from your dashboard.
Subscription rules
A rule is a reusable subscription plan. There are three types:
- Auto-charging — the customer is charged automatically each cycle. The most common type.
- Membership — like auto-charging, but tags the customer and order so you can gate member-only content or perks.
- Recurring invoice — sends an invoice each cycle instead of charging automatically. Good for stores that prefer manual payment.
What you set on a rule
- Billing frequency and interval (every X days, weeks, months, or years)
- Which products it applies to — specific products or your whole catalog
- Optional per-cycle discount to reward subscribers
- Minimum or maximum number of cycles, if you want a fixed term
Storefront widget
The widget is what customers see on a product page. It shows a "One-time purchase" and "Subscribe & save" option, plus a frequency picker if the product has more than one interval.
To add it: Online Store → Themes → Customize, open a product template, click Add block, and choose ZS Subscription Widget. You can set the labels and colors to match your store.
How billing works
Once a customer subscribes, ZS runs the billing cycle for you:
- At checkout, Shopify creates a subscription contract with the customer's saved payment method.
- A background scheduler checks every few minutes for contracts due to renew.
- When one is due, ZS asks Shopify to charge the saved payment method.
- On success, Shopify creates a new order and notifies the customer.
Because billing runs on Shopify's payment vault, you stay PCI-compliant automatically — no card data ever touches the app.
Failed payments & recovery
If a renewal charge fails (expired card, insufficient funds), ZS handles it through "dunning":
- It retries the charge on a schedule you set in Settings → Billing
- It emails the customer to update their payment method
- After the final retry, it does what you've configured — pause or cancel the subscription
You control the number of retries, the delay between them, and the final action.
Managing subscriptions
The Subscriptions page lists every contract. You can search by email, customer name, or subscription ID, and filter by status (active, paused, cancelled, failed).
For any subscription you can pause, resume, or cancel on the customer's behalf. Changes sync to Shopify immediately.
Customer portal
The portal lets subscribers manage their own plans without contacting you. They can pause, resume, skip a delivery, or cancel.
To enable it, add the ZS Subscriptions Portal block to a page or your account template in the theme editor. Customers access it when logged in to their account.
Automations
Automations run extra logic on your subscriptions:
- Loyalty discounts — automatically apply a discount after a customer reaches a set number of renewals
- Product swaps — swap a product, add a gift, or remove a gift after a specific payment
- Bulk actions — regenerate billing schedules or reschedule billing across all contracts at once
Analytics
Every metric is computed from your real contract and billing data:
- Statistics — MRR, average and total revenue, churn and growth rates
- Upcoming revenue — what's scheduled to bill in the next 7 days
- Retention — how many subscribers survive to each renewal
- Cancellation reasons — why customers cancel, ranked
Settings
Configure how the app behaves under Settings:
- Billing — retry attempts, delay, and what happens after the final failed charge
- Widget — labels, colors, and design of the storefront widget
- Notifications — which emails are sent to customers
- Translations — customer-facing text in your store's language
- Cancellation flow — the reasons customers pick when cancelling
FAQ
No. All payments run through Shopify's native payment vault. The app never sees or stores card data.
The widget only appears on products that are part of a subscription rule. Add the product to a rule, then make sure the widget block is placed in your product template.
ZS retries the charge on your configured schedule and emails the customer. After the final retry, it pauses or cancels the subscription based on your settings.
Yes — add the customer portal block to your store. Logged-in customers can pause, resume, skip, or cancel themselves.
Yes. Each successful renewal creates a new order in your Shopify admin, just like a normal sale.
Support
Need help? Reach us from the Support center inside the app, or email our team directly. We typically reply within one business day.