Cutoff Days is a feature that is often a source of confusion among merchants. This article is dedicated to explaining how it works.

When configuring a subscription plan, you have the option to set a subscription renewal day.

To illustrate how it works, let's say you run a monthly subscription for a product and a customer purchases a subscription on October 20th. When the default “same day as the initial order was made” option is set, it will then renew on November 20th, December 20th, and so on.

Some merchants, however, may want to combine all of their orders to renew on the same day. Let's say you'd like to have your subscriptions renew on the 1st of each month.

You can select 1st from the dropdown in the field and this will make it so that your subscriptions renew on the 1st month for recurring orders. Recurring is worth emphasizing here, as customers’ initial orders will be charged on the day of purchase. It is only when their subscription starts renewing that they will begin to be charged on the first of each month.

Of course, this can result in some undesired cases where, for instance, a customer has purchased on the last day of the month, and then the system will charge them on the next day (start of the next month) as well, or in other words, a double charge.

To avoid this, you can make use of the cutoff days field that appears. Cutoff days make it so that your customers can avoid being double charged by the system if the day they placed their initial order is too close to your chosen subscription renewal date.

So, for this example, we'll be setting it to 30 days, making it so that only purchases made on the 1st of each month go through to the next month’s renewal. Orders placed on any other day of the month will be skipped to the next renewal over.

To illustrate, let's say a customer purchased on the October 1st. This falls within the 30 day cutoff days parameter set, so their renewal will be on November 1st.

Now let's say a customer purchased on the October 15th. This order is too late to be fulfilled on November 1st, so the system will automatically skip that renewal, and move the fulfillment to December 1st, ensuring there will be no double charge.

Feel free to extrapolate this information and apply it to whatever cutoff period works best for your situation, be it 5 days, 2 weeks, and so on.

As a final note, while we illustrated the feature using a monthly frequency, cutoff days are also featured in weekly, and yearly order frequencies, and the interface will automatically update to accommodate each.

For weekly, you select a specific day of the week for renewal, then select the cutoff day.

For monthly, you select a number corresponding to a specific day of the month, then select the cutoff day.

For yearly, you select a month in the first dropdown, then a day of the month in the second, then select the cutoff day