Transferring Subscriptions

[MPDC]

Hi,

We are transferring our shop from Shopify to Square. We have customers who have an active subscription with us. They have an annual subscription, which is fulfilled quarterly, and not automatically renewed. Most of them only have 3 out of 4 quarters left in their subscription. 

What is the best way to transfer these over to square? I was trying to manually add them (by going to subscriptions --> create subscription) but it won't let me enter a past date as the start date on the subscription. 

Thank you.

[BernadetteA]

Welcome, @MPDC 👋

This is a great question. I do not think it is possible to backdate the subscription start date based on @TheRealChipA response here. 

The post I linked is a few months old, but as far as I know there hasn't been a recent update. Please correct me if I am wrong, @TheRealChipA

I highly recommend checking out any responses in that thread as Chip really has a lot of knowledge when it comes to subscriptions! 😊 

[TheRealChipA]

@BernadetteA Unless I was left off of the distribution list for a recent Square memo, nothing has changed on this subject.  However, I might have a work-around if @MPDC is willing to do a little compromise.

Create shortened subscriptions and give them names you’ll remember.  For example, if customers have one of four quarters left, name the subscription OneOfFour, and enroll those customers in a one quarter subscription.  If there are some customers that have two of four quarters left, name that one TwoOfFour and enroll those customers in two quarters.  Since each customer will have it’s own modified “start” date, that should work for what you want.  Unfortunately you won’t have any historical subscriptions for these in Square, but that seems to me to be a small price to pay to get you up and running until you start enrolling everyone else in new annual subscriptions.

Of course, I might be missing something here if your subscriptions are more complicated.  If so, please reply and lay it all out for me and I can try again.

[MPDC]

Sorry, one more thing -- you don't happen to know of a workaround for having pick-up as a fulfillment method when assigning subscriptions? It seems really strange that pick-up is not an option...

[MPDC]

Thanks! This workaround should work for us, I appreciate it. 

If I only there was a system out there that truly did everything we need it to...! 

[MPDC]

Oh man, @TheRealChipA, unfortunately, it looks like it won't work because you can't create a subscription for a customer if the total owed is $0.00. Which is what we'd need to do since they've all already paid.

That's frustrating for many reasons, including that sometimes we gift or giveaway subscriptions. 😞 Maybe they'll change that in a future update. 

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

Ugh.  That’s a wrinkle I hadn’t realized was there.  I agree that we should be able to discount some subscriptions 100% as gifts or make-goods.  That sounds like a feature request on the Ideate Board, though.  If you submit one, post it’s link here and I’ll definitely upvote/like it and add my own comments in support.

To your fulfillment question, unless you can use the “no fulfillment” option right now and keep track in customer notes of fulfillment, there is no workaround.  The Subscriptions is VERY aware of the need for a full compliment of fulfillment methods, so I hope that is being worked on.  Why don’t you try creating your own subscription, with “no fulfillment” and see how the flow works.  Let me know what roadblocks you find and maybe we can work around those together.  All is not lost just yet!

One last try for your $0 subscription issue.  Could you create $0.01 subscriptions and either have the customer pay those OR pay them yourself?  Again, not perfect, but workable?  I’m going to help you figure this out if it kills me! LOL

[MPDC]

I thought about the .01 and paying, but unfortunately, it then assigns our credit card to that person's profile and they get an email saying they paid $0.01 (which is confusing on its own) and then if they click on the link in the email receipt it shows that our card is on file and asks if they want to change the card on file for the subscription. So I don't think that will work, since we don't really want our card on file for their subscription. 

I'll put in a feature request. There's so much missing from Square (way more than I realized, unfortunately), but it's also the closest thing we've been able to find that will work for our needs as a mixed-type store. We have (or will have; we're opening our brick-and-mortar in June) a massive retail store that also does e-commerce, equipment rentals on-site, subscriptions, a lending library of books, workshops, classes, a restaurant, and a bar. 

[MPDC]

Link to feature request: https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Square-Subscriptions/Feature-Request-Ability-to-add-subscriptions...

[TheRealChipA]

I added my support to that.  The only other thing I can suggest is for you to go to the Square App Marketplace and look for third-party subscription apps that integrate with your Square account.  One I would suggest is Submatic, which seems to have many features that Square Subscriptions doesn’t currently have, especially different fulfillment methods like Pickup. Even if your feature request is added to the product roadmap, unless it is already in development it will take a while (months probably) for full implementation.  I doubt if you can wait that long.  That’s the beauty of the App Marketplace — you can find apps and features that you need now and still keep using Square for payment processing.