We’ve had several merchants test out subscriptions by adding the product to a draft order in the Shopify admin. Our app sets products to be subscription-only, yet merchants are still allowed to add and complete a draft order with these products.
Please update the draft orders interface so that if a product is set to only be available as a subscription, the draft order cannot be completed (ideally show the same message as the storefront sees indicating that the variant requires a selling plan).
Can you help me understand the problem here: are merchants preparing single-purchase orders and picking the wrong type of products to add to the drafts by accident, or are they intentionally about setting up subscription orders on behalf of their customers? What issues does that cause on your end if they do the latter?
Merchants are testing out our app by creating a draft order with a subscription product. The product is set to only allow being sold as a subscription, and draft orders doesn’t support subscriptions, so it’s creating an order with that product, but with no recurring properties.
They then assume that the app isn’t working properly and reach out, which is a reasonable reaction. I would think that if a product can only be sold as a subscription, it should not be available as a product when creating a draft order.
Since it now sounds like Shopify will not support subscriptions with draft orders, there is a large outstanding issue that I think will keep coming up.
Many discounting apps use draft orders to apply a discount, then send customers to check out with that draft order. This is a huge problem for membership apps, since our products can only be purchased as a subscription, but it’s also a huge problem for subscription apps. It means that if anybody tries to purchase a product with a selling plan using a discounting app that uses draft orders, the subscription will not be created.
Not only that, it can’t even be recovered because Shopify did not save the payment method for this customer.
Can somebody please prioritize updating the draft orders API so that it gives an error when trying to create a draft order with selling plans? Especially with products that are set to only be sold as a subscription.
Even better. Please update Draft Orders to accept products that have a subscription plan, and assign a contract to the customer, so that we can process these kinds of products with no effort, as it should be. Draft Orders are blind to subscription plans, but opening that up does not seem like too terrible of a thing to do. We get to do it in our Apps, so surely Shopify can do it in Draft Orders without too much sweat.
