Letting customers manage their own subscriptions

Subscribers can manage their own subscriptions from their account on your shop. They sign in, open My Subscriptions, and pause, change or cancel without emailing you. You choose how much they are allowed to do.

Considerations

• A customer needs an account on your shop to reach the page. See Inviting customers to create an account.
• What customers can do is set in your subscription settings, so turn on only what suits your shop.
• Anything a customer does shows on the subscription in your dashboard.

What customers see

The page lists one card per subscription. Each card shows:

• The product name, the plan name and how often it is charged.
• The amount per billing cycle.
• A status label: Trial, Active, Past due, Paused, Cancelled or Expired.
• Current period: the dates the subscription is paid up to.
• Trial ends, Ends or Cancelled, where those dates apply.

What customers can do

The buttons a customer sees depend on the status of the subscription.

• Pause: puts an active or trialling subscription on hold. The plan, the price and their details are kept.
• Resume: starts a paused subscription again. It sits where Pause was.
• Change plan: moves the subscription to another plan on the same product, such as monthly to quarterly.
• Quantity: raises or lowers how many units are on the subscription.
• Cancel: ends the subscription. The customer is asked why, and the answer is optional.

Once a subscription is cancelled or has run out, the buttons and the quantity control are no longer shown.

Choose what customers can do themselves

1. From your Orbit dashboard, go to Settings, then Subscription Settings.
2. In Customer Self-Service, turn on Allow customers to pause or Allow customers to change plan.
3. In Cancellation Policy, turn on Allow customers to cancel.
4. Click Save changes. The button leaves the screen once the settings are saved.

Tip: Point your support replies at the page. A customer who pauses usually comes back. A customer who has to wait for an answer often cancels instead.

See it from your side

From your Orbit dashboard, go to Subscriptions. The list shows the customer, the product, the plan, the status, the amount and the next payment date. Click a row to open the subscription and read its history. You can pause, change or cancel on a customer's behalf from the same page, which is what to do when someone emails you instead of using their account.

Related guides

• Pausing and resuming a subscription
• Changing a subscriber's plan
• Cancelling a subscription
• Changing your subscription settings