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Setting subscriptions to auto-expire

All subscription products you create on Subbly are set to auto-renew by default. However, if you want to create products that will auto-cancel after a set number of periods, this article explains how you can do that.

Use cases

Below you can find a couple of examples and use cases of when you can set your subscriptions to auto-expire:

  • selling gift subscriptions that are cancelled after certain period of time
  • offering a seasonal subscription box that lasts only for certain period of time before it cancels
To find out more about how gifting works, please check the article here.

How to set this up

In order to set your subscription product to auto-expire after a specific number of payment cycles, you need to ensure that the following flag is enabled on the product creation screen.

Once you have this flag enabled, you need to specify the number of cycles the subscription will be active before it gets cancelled automatically.

In this particular example, the subscription is set to auto-expire after 3 payment cycles. Cycle is considered a payment period and can stem from a day up to a couple of years, depending on the product setup.

For example, if your product's billing cycle is set to every week, setting the subscription to auto expire after 3 cycles means that the customer will be charged 3 times (for 3 weeks) before his/hers subscription automatically ends and gets cancelled by the system.
If you're combining the auto-expiration with the trial functionality, you should know that the trial period is also considered as 1 payment cycle.

How is this displayed on the checkout and on the admin

If the subscription product is set to auto-expire after certain number of payment cycles, this will be presented to the customer at the checkout as seen below

Merchants can see the number of payment cycles left before the customer's subscription is set to auto-expire at a glance both from the customer profile as seen below..

.. as well as from the Subscriptions list on the admin.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please make sure to reach out to the support team!

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