🔄Subscriptions Guide

Learn about Subscription features and best practices for your store

Subscriptions Overview

Subscriptions are supported natively in 29 Next, and represent the concept of an automated, periodically recurring order for a customer.

Subscriptions can contain any combination of products and quantities from your store catalogue, with a scheduled billing interval configurable by day, week, or month.

Subscriptions may also be modified, updated, or canceled at any time to change the next renewal date, adjust billing frequency, update the products, or apply a promotion or discount to avoid cancellations.

Subscriptions Settings

From the Settings > Subscriptions area, configure settings that will control your store's handling of subscription events.

Set custom subscription Cancel Reasons, which can be set to public or non-public, and configure Failed Payments Handling. See Subscription Cancellation Paths and Subscription Renewal Decline Salvage for more detail on each feature set.

You may configure Upcoming Renewal Notifications to notify your customers via email of upcoming recurring billing events, either for all billing events or only prior to the first recurring charge in a subscription.

Managing Subscriptions

From the Subscriptions menu you can view and access all subscriptions.

Search by Subscription ID, and filter subscriptions by

• Subscription Status

• Products

• Next Renewal Date (before / after target date)

• Order Number

• Customer Email

• Customer Phone

Subscription Details View

Click View to see the Subscription Details view, which displays an overview of the Subscription, the items contained in it, the orders history, any events that have taken place during its lifecycle on the Timeline, and available actions to manage it.

From the subscription detail view, there are several actions available to manage the subscription:

• Change Next Renewal Date Manually specify the next renewal date to expedite or delay the next recurring order.

• Change Schedule Change the billing frequency to better match the customer’s needs for recurring intervals.

• Process Renewal Now Process the next recurring order immediately.

• Change Payment Gateway Change the gateway that will automatically bill the customer's next subscription order.

• Cancel Cancel the subscription and specify a cancellation reason.

Modify Subscriptions

The Items table shows the Products, Price, and Quantity included in the subscription

• Choose Add Products to add additional products to the subscription.

• Choose Actions > Update to modify the existing product's quantity or price.

All subscription renewal orders can be viewed on the Timeline, offering easy access to view and manage each order.

Every update to a subscription is logged, with the Timeline providing a full log of details for a subscription’s history, changes, and orders. View and track all user initiated changes to a subscription, whether initiated by the customer or a Dashboard user.

Subscription Statuses

Subscription Statuses represent various points in a Subscriber’s lifecycle.

Status	Description
Pending	Initial order is pending payment. Once payment is confirmed the status will update to Active.
Active	Subscription is Active and is scheduled to renew at the set Next Renewal Date.
Retrying	Subscription could not be renewed and is currently in an automated recovery process state.
Past Due	Subscription could not renew due to a failed recurring payment attempt.
Canceled	Subscription is canceled and will not renew.

Subscription Renewal Decline Salvage

When a subscription fails to renew due to a failed payment, 29 Next helps you recover the payment and retain your customer with automated retry capabilities.

Subscription renewal payments may fail for various reasons that are temporary, and often the best course of action is to simply retry the renewal at a later time and date. When a renewal payment failure occurs, 29 Next categorizes the reason to determine whether the issue is temporary and the renewal should be reattempted.

Failed Payments Handling

To enable subscription renewal retries and control the settings, navigate to Settings > Subscriptions from the Dashboard.

Payment Decline Types

Soft Declines - may be reattempted again in the future. Soft declines carry payment failure reason codes in the 2000 range.

Hard Declines - not recommended to retry, no automated reattempt occurs. Decline reason codes in the 3000 range.

For more information, see Transaction Response Codes

Subscriptions that fail renewal payment will be retried if Automatic Retry Mode is enabled. While a subscription is retrying, the status will be “Retrying” and the “Next Retry Date” will be displayed in the subscription details.

Subscription Renewal Smart Retry

The optimized “Smart” retry schedule is based on aggregate data from industry leaders, tuned to provide the highest chance of recovery for subscribers, while minimizing decline transaction fees and ratios on your merchant account.

Decline Salvage Schedule

• Attempt 1 - Retry 3 days after first decline at 2 PM in store timezone

• Attempt 2 - Retry on 1st or 16th of the month at 3 PM in store timezone

• Attempt 3 - Retry on the next upcoming Friday at 2 PM in store timezone

After all retries have completed, a subscription will transition to Past Due or Canceled depending on your store’s settings.

Subscription Cancellation Paths

To customize subscription cancellation reasons, navigate to Settings > Subscriptions

Add, Edit, or Remove custom Cancel Reasons to track the reasons why subscribers choose to cancel their subscriptions.

Note that only cancel reasons set to “Public” will be available for selection by customers when canceling subscriptions within their storefront Customer Accounts.

For Dashboard users, when manually canceling a customer’s subscription, all cancel reasons will be viewable and available for selection.

Subscription Cancellation by Cancel Reason is available on the Subscribers Dashboard for easy reference and tracking.

Customers may access their subscriptions to edit or cancel them from their storefront Customer Accounts. Customers have the option of changing the next billing date, the billing frequency, and the quantity and items contained in their subscriptions. (Note, this is optional depending on your storefront theme).