Grow your business: Ask us anything about subscriptions and recurring payments!

[Tom]

👋  Hello Sellers! We were thrilled to have our Subscriptions team drop in for a Q&A on Wednesday, September 1st at noon PT / 3pm ET!

We recently launched a set of subscription features that unlock the ability to create subscription plans and accept recurring payments with your customers. As we will continue to iterate after this initial launch, our product team wants to hear directly from you.

With that, it was exciting to introduce you to @JenLax, who has been leading the charge with this new set of features. She and her team were eager to hear your thoughts on everything ranging from initial setup—to what you'd like to see more of in the future.

Note on account-specific questions: For your privacy and security, we are not able to address issues related to specific payments, deposits, or account status details in our public forums. If you need assistance on one of those topics, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive into your account.

[JosietheBeautic]

My questions are, for recurring payments - is there an option to not let clients cancel their own subscription? 

I am starting a membership structure for my business and the incentive is to get discounted rates as a member of my services offered. Clients get a discount for signing up as a member with recurring payments but if they are able to just cancel their subscription, it defeats the whole purpose of a membership program and I will lose out on loyalty while giving just anyone a discount on their service. 

Also, Is there a way to see if a client have or are enrolled in recurring payments without having to trace back to their history and profile?

[JosietheBeautic]

@JenLax @Tom Also, there aren't any directions on how exactly subscriptions operate. Someone subscribes and pays.. and then what happens? Where does it go from there?

[jean_sq]

We do not have the option to restrict subscribers from canceling their subscription. However we are working on which types of configuration options (notifications, reminders, subscription/plan control granularity) should be made available to sellers in the near future. We are gathering feedback and would love to hear what controls are most important to you. 

With regards to seeing if a customer is a current subscriber, there is no automatic way to do that with subscriptions. Next year we plan to add more member management features.

[MudFire_Dex]

Hi @jean_sq - I definitely have a similar need and would love to offer feedback as a seller. We manage a membership base and require a 30 day cancellation notice - so I'd be interested to see what kind of restrictions could be created.

[edriverz]

I started to use the team feature and ended up firing the one employee I had after a couple of weeks for theft. Now I can't seem to shut the team portion of it off.

[AdamB]

Hi @edriverz - stepping in for @Tom here.

See this thread on how to disable team management for instructions. If you have any questions, reply on that thread and we can help. 🙂

[KatieHollister]

Hello, For a subscription of the month type club that offers products (e.g., a pound of coffee a month, a bottle of wine a month, cupcakes, etc.) that can be picked up at a retail location rather than shipped to the subscriber, how do we track whether a customer has picked up/received the product they are subscribing to? We need a way to track these pick-ups at the retail POS.

If there is not a way to track whether a customer has picked-up/received their subscription, will the loyalty program integrate with Subscriptions?

I manage a monthly wine club and am using the loyalty program as a work around to track wine pickups by club members and manage their status. Each month, club members are invoiced using recurring invoices and a card on file. The loyalty program is not integrated with recurring invoices -- As a result, every month I have to into each club member's account and add the rewards (bottles of wine) by hand so that we can track when they have picked up their monthly allotment. Very time consuming and a lot of work! I would welcome suggestions on how Subscriptions could address this problem. Thanks!

[jean_sq]

Itemized subscriptions that support fulfillment workflows are coming in the first half of 2022. With regards to Loyalty, subscriptions is not currently integrated but we hope to complete that work in 2022.

[Steenie]

How can I cancel a mistakenly entered charge on a credit card and refund that money to the customer, without cancelling the entire invoice? This happens because large groups of individuals book a stay and then change their mind.

[Klanier22]

Hi Tom, I am very interested in subscription through square for my customers, as its something we have been trying to get set up that is user friendly and customer friendly. I own a small craft coffee shop and I have a website that I would like it to be linked to ( unsure the exact platform that it was built on ) but that would be our main target to direct customers to a clickable link on our website that would lead them to setting up a subscription that links and comes through to us in square. 

Will it have reminders for billing and shipments?

How will the user be charged for reaccuring payments that are saved? Right now that is the highest rate for processing and fees? WIll that decrease , stay the same or go away?

Thank you, looking forward to wednesday.

Kristen

[jean_sq]

You can use Square Online Checkout Links to generate buy button code that you could embed on your website to allow customers to sign up online. However, since we don’t have fulfillment support, you will need to track your inventory separately. 

With regards to billing and shipment reminders, we are working on which types of configuration options (notifications, reminders, subscription/plan control granularity) should be made available to sellers in the near future. We are gathering feedback and would love to hear what controls are most important to you.

[John-L]

Hey, Jean. Came to help/support looking for info on configuring notifications for subscriptions. We are a nonprofit and use the subscription feature for recurring donations, and would like to notify our subscribers that their recurring donation is tax deductible, etc.

[jean_sq]

Hi John! The subscriptions product does not currently have the ability to notify subscribers like you are describing. For this, you could either export out your customer list and send to them through an external email program or you could use Square Marketing as well. Hope this helps!

[BeadedLioness]

Will there be a section under our Online Dashboard (Square Website) to add and edit subscriptions to add on our website like our list of items. Right now, I would have to copy and paste each link and type the subscriptions details on the website. 

There also isn't space to give a full description of a created subscription. I also have to delete a subscription just to edit price or name before I activate a subscription. I plan to offer multiple types and having a drop down menu for subscriptions would help my customer choose. Simply put, mirror the site items creation section and the website section. 

[jean_sq]

We do not currently have an integration with Square Online. However, we do hope to complete that work in the near future so any thoughts you have on what would be important is very helpful. We will also be adding the ability for you to edit subscription plans after they are created.

[pinballgallery]

I'm writing this in December of 2022...

Did the ability to edit a subscription plan ever get implemented?  I created a couple of subscription plans to test out the configurability and now want to modify the price of the plans before I start creating subscriptions based on those plans.  There doesn't seem to be any way to edit a plan or even delete a plan and recreate it with the correct pricing.

From reading through this thread, it seems like a lot of the enhancements to subscriptions mentioned in 2021 were planned in 2022, but never got implemented.

When are these basic capabilities (like editing and deleting plans) going to be implemented?

[jean_sq]

Hi @pinballgallery - I'm on the Subscriptions team here at Square. The team is looking to tackle both plan edits (like price changes) and better filtering on Dashboard (so you can hide old plans from view) in 2023. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! Thank you 🙂

[timothycope76]

Looking to tackle….. when?

[jean_sq]

@timothycope76 Based on what I've heard from product team, I'd estimate the 2nd half of 2023

[bookandbottle]

1. Is there a way to require payments by a certain date?
2. Is there a way to require that if a person subscribes after a certain part of the month that their subscription wouldn't start until the following month?
3. Is there a way to edit a subscription without deleting it and starting a new one?
4. Is there a way to require card on file for new subscriptions?
5. Is Subscriptions available on the Square Online store?
6. Will I be able to manage my subscribers through the Customers portal (in other words, will a person who is a subscriber be coded in a particular way so that I could set them to receive a "group discount" as long as they're members? Also, if they stopped paying their subscription, would they automatically be un-coded as a subscriber?
7. Do subscriptions link with Orders in any way so we can track who has picked up their subscription and who hasn't?

[jean_sq]

1. Subscriptions are billed on their start date (which by default is when they first subscribe). If you are inquiring about custom billing dates, that feature is coming by the end of this year.
2. You can currently configure the start date on individual subscriptions but you cannot yet configure start dates at the plan level
3. At the subscription level you can currently edit the card on file and add/edit notes. In the near future we plan to allow you to edit price and sales tax. Is there something in particular that you would like to edit at the subscription level?
4. If you create a Square Online Checkout link, it will require the subscriber to add a card for payment. If you create the subscription manually through the dashboard, you can enter the card there.
5. Subscriptions is not yet directly integrated into Square Online. We hope to complete that integration by the end of 2021/early 2022.
6. Currently, you cannot manage subscribers through the Customer portal but we are working to prioritize that work by the end of this year or early 2022.
7. We currently don’t support fulfillment flows, but hope to roll that out in early 2022.