How Subscription Products Can Be Offered
If a product has selling plans enabled, you can configure it in one of the following ways:
One-Time Purchase Only
The product is shown as a standard post-purchase upsell.
No subscription option is available to the customer.
This behaves like a regular upsell product.
Subscription Only
The product requires a selling plan.
Customers can only purchase the product as a subscription.
One-time purchases are not available
One-Time Purchase and Subscription
Customers can choose between:
A one-time purchase, or
A subscription (based on the product’s selling plans).
Subscription pricing and cadence are pulled directly from Shopify.
This option is commonly used to encourage subscriptions without forcing them.
Default Purchase Option
When you offer a product with both one-time purchase and subscription options, you can choose which option is selected by default in the post-purchase offer.
The default option determines what customers see preselected when the offer loads. Customers can still switch between one-time purchase and subscription before accepting the offer.
Choosing a default option allows you to guide customer behavior without removing flexibility, and can be useful for highlighting subscriptions while still allowing one-time purchases.
Subscription Replacement
Aftersell supports subscription replacement, which allows you to replace a one-time product purchase with a subscription version of the same product during the post-purchase experience.
This allows customers to start a subscription after checkout without re-entering payment or shipping details. The subscription is created using the selling plan selected in the post-purchase offer.
If a customer accepts a subscription upsell during the post-purchase flow, any subsequent offers in the funnel will no longer include subscription options.
To avoid skipped or redundant offers, you should configure your funnel so that only one subscription upsell can be triggered per order.
Subscription discounts
When you apply a discount to a subscription upsell, the discount only applies to the first subscription cycle.
Recurring orders will not include the discount. This is clearly communicated in the offer experience with a “Recurring subtotal” line so you can see what customers will be charged on future renewals.
Shopify Subscription Limitations
Due to Shopify platform limitations, there are important constraints to be aware of:
You cannot add a subscription product to an order that already contains a subscription.
This limitation is enforced by Shopify and applies to all post-purchase apps, not just Aftersell.
What This Means
If the original order already includes a subscription item, post-purchase offers cannot introduce another subscription.
Post-purchase subscription offers are only available when the original order contains no subscription items.
For more details, refer to the official Shopify developer documentation on subscription limitations.
Aftersell integrates directly with Shopify’s Subscription API, ensuring compatibility with modern subscription apps such as ReCharge Subscriptions, Appstle Subscriptions, Smartrr Subscriptions, to name a few.
No additional configuration is required as long as your subscription app uses Shopify’s Subscription API.