Shopify Subscriptions vs Funnelish Subscriptions

TL;DR: Shopify Subscriptions is a free first-party app, and it works well if you run Shopify Payments and sell to one market. It restricts you to five gateways, blocks local payment methods on recurring orders, and won't work with bundles. Funnelish runs subscriptions through your own gateway and adds no processing fee of its own. That starts to matter once your recurring revenue is large enough for a 2% cut to hurt. Pick Shopify for simplicity on a single market. Pick Funnelish when gateway choice, international payment methods or funnel-level upsells are part of the plan.

You can sell on a recurring basis with either one. The differences show up in the constraints, and Shopify documents all of theirs.

Can You Sell Subscriptions on Shopify?

Yes. Shopify has its own subscriptions app and gives it away, and dozens of paid alternatives compete with it in the Shopify App Store. Your store needs a supported payment gateway and a theme built on sections and blocks.

The free app carries a 3.7-star rating across 804 reviews, and 19% of them are one star. For a tool Shopify builds and gives away, that spread tells you the edges get rough for some merchants.

Side by Side

The gateway row and the local payment methods row need more explanation, since they decide the answer in most real cases.

Gateway

Shopify supports five gateways for subscription contracts: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net, Adyen, and Stripe, with Stripe limited to select merchants. Authorize.net offers PayPal as the only wallet, with no Apple Pay or Google Pay. PayPal Express needs approval for reference transactions before recurring billing works. Shopify Payments gets the widest wallet support, plus automatic card updates that cut failed renewals when a customer's card is reissued.

So the app works best when you're on Shopify Payments. Step outside it and third-party transaction fees land on every order, subscriptions included. On Basic that's 2%.

The Funnelish approach differs. Subscriptions run through whichever gateway you already use, and nothing gets added on top of what your processor charges. Stripe, PayPal, NMI, Airwallex, Checkout.com, Klarna and Razorpay are all supported at checkout. Which of them handle recurring billing depends on the gateway itself, so confirm with yours before you build.

That compounds every month on recurring revenue. Here's what it costs you:

Selling Internationally

Shopify documents that customers can't use local payment methods to buy subscriptions. If you sell into countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Austria or Germany, that removes iDEAL, Bancontact, P24, EPS and SEPA Direct Debit from your recurring orders. In several European countries these are the default way people pay online, and card-only recurring billing quietly excludes them.

But these methods work at Funnelish checkouts, paired with geo-funnels that serve multi-currency checkout and regional payment options from one URL. For recurring orders specifically, availability depends on your gateway, so check before you promise a market something you can't bill.

What You Need Before You Start

Shopify checks three things before the app will run on your Shopify store:

• A supported gateway. One of the five listed above, active on your account.

• A compatible theme. It needs sections and blocks, so Online Store 2.0 themes, the Horizon family, Debut 15.0 and up, or Brooklyn 17.0 and up.

• Staff access. Whoever sets it up needs the apps and sales channels permission.

Shopify also documents a handful of edges worth reading before you build around them. Subscription products work on the online store, POS, Shop and custom storefronts, and nowhere else. Gift cards and Shopify Scripts only apply to the first payment of a subscription. Draft orders and the order edits API don't support subscriptions at all. Bundles aren't compatible with the app. And renewals bill the day after they're due, at 10:00 am.

Together they shape what you can build, so read them before you design an offer that depends on one.

Funnelish asks for less: a paid plan and a connected gateway. Subscription features are part of the platform on every tier, so there's no separate app to install, no compatibility check against your theme, and no second integration to maintain.

Read more: Ecommerce Subscription Model Is the Last Unfair Advantage in D2C

How to Set Up Subscriptions on Shopify

Install the Shopify Subscriptions app, create a subscription plan, then attach it to your products. Setup runs about fifteen minutes for a first plan.

1. Install the app from the Shopify App Store.

2. In your Shopify admin, open the app and create a subscription plan. Set the delivery frequency, weekly or monthly or whatever suits, and any discount as a percentage off.

3. Choose which subscription products the plan applies to. You can add products individually or by collection.

4. Publish. The purchase option now shows on those product pages, and customers pick one-time or subscribe at checkout.

5. Personalize your email templates for payment reminders and order confirmations.

Behind the scenes Shopify creates selling plans, and each customer who subscribes gets a subscription contract holding their terms, payment details and shipping address. You can review contracts and upcoming orders from the app dashboard, filter by status, and jump straight to a single subscriber. The plan will also display as a purchase option on the product page once you publish it. Shopify's Community has a video walkthrough if you'd rather watch the complete flow once before doing it.

Setting the same thing up in Funnelish happens inside the funnel builder, so the plan, the checkout and any upsell live in one place. One dashboard covers active subscriptions, renewals and metrics, and you can edit a plan without touching code.

How to Cancel Subscriptions on Shopify

Customers cancel from their account page, and merchants can cancel from the Shopify admin. Both routes end the subscription contract and stop future subscription payments.

• For the customer: log in to their account on your website, open the subscription, and choose to pause, skip the next order or cancel. A pause subscription action stops charges without ending the contract, and they can resume subscription later. Skipping moves the next order along without cancelling anything.

• For you: open the app in your Shopify admin, find the contract, and cancel or edit it manually. You can also change the delivery frequency or update billing details there.

Make your cancellation terms visible at checkout. Regulators expect clear disclosure on auto-renewing plans, and burying the exit is what draws complaints and chargebacks.

Discounts, Offers and What You Can Attach

Either platform lets you take a percentage off recurring orders to get people to subscribe, and the discount attaches to the plan when you create it.

Shopify

A discount code your customer types at checkout behaves differently from an automatic discount, and Shopify Scripts touching subscription costs or shipping rates only affect the first payment. Gift cards work the same way, covering payment one and nothing after it. If your offer design assumes an ongoing discount, check which mechanism you're using before you launch.

Funnelish

The offer itself lives inside the funnel, so a subscription can carry an order bump on the checkout and a post-purchase upsell after it. Somebody subscribing to a monthly refill can be offered an annual plan on the next page, with their payment details already stored. That's an example of the difference in shape: Shopify manages the subscription, while Funnelish builds the sale around it.

The Numbers Nobody Publishes

Subscription performance by billing interval is not well benchmarked, and the following data is what you should be recording yourself.

Churn depends on how often you ask. A monthly plan asks the customer to keep paying twelve times a year. An annual plan asks once. That difference alone makes annual retention look better before you improve anything.

Comparing a monthly plan's churn to an annual plan's churn without that conversion produces nonsense. Convert both to the same basis first.

Failed payments cost more than cancellations. Involuntary churn gets less attention than the voluntary kind and often runs larger. Take 1,000 active subscribers at $39 a month:

Recovery rate is the metric almost nobody reports. At an 8% failure rate, moving recovery from 30% to 70% is worth $14,976 a year on that base, and none of it requires a single new customer. Card-updater services, retry timing and a payment method your customer can change without emailing support all feed that number.

Trial to paid moves faster than churn does. On 1,000 trials at $39, lifting conversion from 25% to 35% adds $3,900 a month, or $46,800 a year. Trial length is worth testing, since longer trials pull more people in and convert more of them later without changing conversion during the trial itself.

Record four things monthly and you'll know more than any published benchmark can tell you: churn split by billing interval, trial-to-paid conversion, renewal failure rate, and the share of failures you recover.

Funnelish Subscription Benchmarks

The section above lists what to record. Here's what these numbers look like across Funnelish subscription funnels.

Methodology: [[ADD N]] subscription funnels across [[ADD N]] merchant accounts, [[ADD SAMPLE SIZE]] active subscribers, [[ADD PERIOD]]. Churn is measured on active subscriptions at the start of each period.

Churn by Billing Interval

Trial to Paid

Failed Payment Recovery

Customer Portal Impact

Running Both Together

You don't have to choose in every case. Funnelish syncs orders to Shopify, so fulfillment, inventory and reporting stay where they are while acquisition runs through funnels. Merchants who already have a Shopify store and a warehouse process built around it tend to save time this way instead of migrating everything.

A rough split that works: Shopify for catalog, fulfillment and support; Funnelish for paid traffic, offer pages and the subscription checkout attached to them. Order data flows back, so your overview of the business stays in one place instead of split across two commerce dashboards.

If you'd rather see it than read about it, the funnel builder is drag and drop, and building a subscription offer page takes an afternoon. Funnelish resources and community posts cover the gateway setup, and support is on chat for the parts that depend on your specific gateway.

Which One Should You Pick

• Choose Shopify Subscriptions if you already run Shopify Payments, sell mainly to one country, want it free, and don't need bundles with subscriptions.

• Choose Funnelish if you use a different gateway and don't want to pay 2% for the privilege, sell into markets where local payment methods matter, or want subscription offers built into a funnel with upsells and order bumps around them.

Explore Funnelish Subscriptions

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