How to Offer Recurring Subscriptions with NextPaw

We currently do not support automatic subscriptions, but we do store the customer and payment information in your stripe account for every order, which means you can easily add a subscription to any customer that orders from your NextPaw Online Store! This process does require some quick understanding, and an internal process your team should follow, which we have documented for you below.

What's required

In order to set up a recurring payment, you'll need to have a few things in place:

• Stripe account connected to your online store.
• Products set up in your online store with custom subscription options.

• An internal process to make subscriptions in Stripe every time you receive a new order with a subscription option selected.

With those 3 things in place, you're ready to set up a recurring subscription in Stripe when you receive an order.

Watch the Video Overview of this Process

Setting up recurring subscriptions in Stripe

Once you've collected a payment via your online store, you'll notice that your Stripe account now contains a new customer record.

Step 1. Head to your Stripe account. Look up the record for the customer you want to add a recurring subscription to using their email address. Click on the customer.

Step 2. Go to the Subscriptions section of this record and click the Add subscription button.

Step 3. From there, you'll be taken to the subscription page. Add the products that were ordered and complete the form to setup each product you would like to add to the subscription. You will choose if the product subscription will be monthly, quarterly, etc. 

Once your products are created, they can be added to any subscription order for any customer in the future. You only need to add the product once for it to be applied to new subscriptions.

Step 4. In the "Payment method" section, make sure the option to "Automatically charge a payment method on file" is selected to charge the card this customer used to place their order.

As soon as your products have been added to the subscription and payment method looks correct, click the "Schedule Subscription" button. NOTE: DO NOT CLICK the "Start Subscription" button.

Step 5. In the "Start..." section, click "On a custom date" to select the exact date you would like your customer to be charged again. They have already been charged for their order when they placed it, your job now is to set up a recurring subscription for that order, and have it start exactly on the day you choose, which will set up the subscription to charge the customer not his date and recur according to your subscription schedule.

Click on "Schedule Subscription" and that's it! Once you've created a subscription, you've created a recurring payment. 

Step 6. In your dashboard, go to "Online Store →  My Sales → Orders" and update the "Fulfillment Status" from "Awaiting Processing TO Processing" to tell yourself that the order has been reviewed and you have manually set up a subscription for this order. 

Step 7. Make sure you have notated internally that this customer is on an active subscription. You need to ensure you fulfill on their order each month. Our system will not notify you "yet" about any subscription sales. You are able to accept new orders, and turn those into subscriptions using this process. It is up to you to ensure your customers' order is fulfilled on-time, each month.