Making changes to subscriptions created using selling plans

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Topic summary

Issue: Updating delivery frequency on subscriptions created via selling plans didn’t change next billing date or create new orders. Changing the selling plan (name/id) and intervals alone had no effect on billing.

Clarification: To change frequency, the app must update all relevant parts of the subscription contract via subscriptionContractUpdate, including delivery policy, billing policy, and nextBillingDate. Modifying only the selling plan metadata is insufficient.

Billing and orders: Shopify does not automatically bill or create recurring orders for subscription contracts (even those using selling plans). After updating the contract, the app must explicitly trigger billing attempts to generate orders.

Guidance: The app is responsible for the subscription lifecycle—managing contract updates and initiating billing attempts. Reference documentation was provided (modeling a subscription app; see the “App” responsibilities column).

Status: Questions answered; no disagreement. Outcome is that the developer should handle full contract updates and trigger billing attempts; no automatic processing by Shopify.

Summarized with AI on January 7. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hiya, we’re building a Shopify app for a store to manage subscriptions on top of the subscriptions api. Subscriptions are created using the selling plans and Shopify checkout. Now we want to use our app to manage the subscriptions e.g changing the delivery frequency. To do this, we first created a subscription draft using the subscriptionContractUpdate mutation. Then we tried to update the selling plan, it worked but didn’t change any of the delivery intervals, just the selling plan name and id. Then we directly updated the intervals. The changes went through but the next billing date would not update, nor are any new orders being created.

So the question is, what is the correct way to update a delivery frequency on a subscriptions created using selling plans? Will futures orders be automatically created once the changes are made or is there something else we need to do?

2

You have to update basically every aspect of the subscription contract that you want changed (delivery and billing policy, next billing date, etc). You’ll also have to trigger the billing attempts to create orders. Almost nothing is done by Shopify’s APIs for you.

3

So, does shopify not create recurring orders for products sold via selling plans? Or is it only when we make a changes to the contract to need to start creating orders via the app?

4

Shopify will never automatically bill a subscription contract.

Take a look at how to model the app here: https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/selling-strategies/subscriptions/modeling#lifecycle-of-a-subscription-app

specifically look at the “App” column to see the basic responsibilities of the app

1 Like
5

Ty.