How to offer a subscription in your upsell offers

Some products are bought once. Others run out and get bought again — wax, filters, coffee, supplements. For those, one sale does not have to be the end of the story.

ReSell can show a Subscribe and save option in your offer, next to the usual one-time purchase or instead of it. Your customer picks one of the purchase options you already offer for that product — Deliver every month, for example — and accepts the offer right there, without leaving the page.

Subscriptions work on all four pages of the Shopify checkout flow where ReSell can place an offer: Checkout, Post-purchase, Thank you and Order status.

Before you start

A Shopify store does not sell subscriptions out of the box, so the first step happens outside ReSell. You need a subscription app — Shopify's own Shopify Subscriptions app, or another app from the Shopify App Store — with the product set up in it.

Everything in the Delivery Frequency list comes from those purchase options: the names, the intervals, the prices and the discounts. ReSell decides which of them your customer sees, and how they look. To change an interval or a price, edit the purchase option in your subscription app.

If the product has no purchase options yet, the Subscription section is simply not shown, and the offer works as a normal one-time offer.

Where to find the settings

1. Open your funnel and go to the step you want — Checkout, Post-purchase, Thank you or Order status page.
2. Click Edit offer.
3. Select the Product block in the left sidebar.
4. Scroll the right panel to the Subscription section.

Every change appears in the preview straight away, so you can see exactly what your customer will see.

The Subscription section in the offer editor.

Example: skis → ski wax

Here is a setup you can copy. The idea behind it is simple: offer the thing your customer will run out of, not the thing they just bought.

Say someone buys All-Mountain Skis for $699.00. Skis last for years, so a subscription for skis makes no sense. Ski wax is a different story — it runs out in the middle of the season, usually at the worst moment.

So the post-purchase offer is a Ski Wax Kit, normally $30.00:

Two frequencies are enough. A longer list makes people stop and compare, and comparing is exactly what you are trying to save them from.

In ReSell, set Display Purchase Options to Both subscription and one-time purchase, Default Selection to Subscription, and the custom discount to 10%. Turn on Show price to compare and Show subscription plan description, with a short line such as Auto-renews every month. Skip or cancel anytime.

Your customer has just spent $699.00. Being asked for $22.50 for something they will need anyway is an easy yes — and the wax arrives before they remember to order it.

Other products that work the same way: edge tuning kits, base cleaner, goggle wipes, ski socks, hand warmers. The test is simple — will they need another one?

What about a ski membership or a season pass? That works too, with the same settings. It is a bigger decision than a $22 tin of wax, so it usually does better on the Thank you or Order status page, where your customer has more time to read. And remember the one-subscription rule: in a single order you can sell the membership or the wax, not both.

Subscriptions on the Post-purchase page

There is one Shopify rule worth knowing here: an order can hold one subscription.

So your offer creates a subscription when the order does not have one yet. It will not add a second one, change a subscription the customer already has, or turn something they bought as a one-time purchase into a subscription. This is the same in every post-purchase app — it is simply how Shopify built the page. See Shopify's notes on post-purchase subscriptions.

In practice this is a small planning decision, not a problem: pick the one product you want people to subscribe to, and let your other post-purchase offers stay one-time.

A couple of other things worth knowing, on any page:

• The first delivery travels with the original order. Your customer pays for it together with everything else, and it ships in the same box. Every delivery after that is a new order, created by your subscription app.
• The subscription lives in your subscription app from then on. Skipping, pausing, changing the address, cancelling — all of it happens in that app's customer portal. Make sure customers can find it from your store account page or from the order confirmation email, which usually contains a link to the subscription management dashboard.

How the custom discount works

Most of the time you do not need to touch the prices at all. Your offer already shows what your store says: the product price for One-time purchase, and the purchase option price for Subscribe and save.

When you do want a sharper price, turn on Apply custom discount in the Discount section. Here is the part that is easy to miss: it applies to the one-time purchase only. The Subscribe and save price does not move — it keeps the discount that lives on its purchase option.

That is not a problem, just something to plan for. If you want the subscription to look more attractive, its discount is set in your subscription app, on the purchase option itself.

Two small things that help:

• The custom discount works inside the offer only, so your normal store price stays safe.
• Leaving Show price to compare on shows the original price next to the offer price, so the saving is easy to see.

The custom discount lowers the one-time price. Subscribe and save keeps the price from its purchase option.

Display Purchase Options

This setting decides what your customer can choose from:

• Both subscription and one-time purchase — the offer shows both, and the customer switches between them. The best choice for most offers: nobody feels pushed, and your subscription discount does the rest.
• Subscription only — the product can be bought as a subscription only, and the Delivery Frequency list opens right away. Good for refill plans and clubs.
• One-time purchase only — a normal offer, with no subscription elements at all, even if the product has purchase options.

The two buttons at the top of the Subscription section — Dropdown and Options — change how the frequencies are shown. Options puts every frequency on screen as a radio button, which reads well with two or three. Dropdown keeps a longer list tidy.

Default Selection

This sets which option is already selected when the offer opens. It appears only when Display Purchase Options is Both subscription and one-time purchase.

• Subscription — the offer opens on Subscribe and save, with the frequency, the description and the consent checkbox visible.
• One-time purchase — the offer opens on One-time purchase, with the subscription elements hidden.

If subscriptions are what you are after, start on Subscription, so the saving is the first thing your customer reads. It only sets the starting point — they can still switch, and the offer updates with no page reload.

Subscription plan description

Under the frequency list, the offer always shows the name of the selected purchase option, for example Monthly subscription. That name comes from your subscription app and changes with the frequency.

Turn on Show subscription plan description to add your own line below it:

Auto-renews every month. Skip or cancel anytime.

It is worth keeping on. It answers the question your customer is already asking themselves.

Subscription description align moves the text left, center or right. To translate it, click Locales next to the field and add the text for each of your store's languages.

The consent checkbox

Before your customer can buy a subscription, they tick a checkbox above the payment button. It tells them their payment method will be charged again automatically.

Where it comes from depends on the page:

• Checkout, Thank you and Order status — Shopify shows its own subscription notice, and ReSell adds nothing.
• Post-purchase — ReSell adds it. Your customer does not enter payment details here: Shopify charges the card they used at checkout a moment earlier, so they need to agree that the same card can be charged again.

The wording is set by Shopify, so there is nothing to edit in ReSell. The Pay Now button becomes active as soon as the box is ticked. The checkbox is not shown for one-time purchases, and it disappears if your customer switches back to One-time purchase.

One part is yours to write, though. The cancellation policy link at the end of the text opens your own policy. Set it in your Shopify admin under Settings → Policies → Purchase options cancellation policy, and click Insert template to start from Shopify's wording. A clear, friendly policy makes subscribing feel a lot safer.

The consent checkbox on the Checkout and Post-purchase pages.

✔️ Next step

Check our articles to learn more about the app's functionality:

• Why is my Post-purchase upsell offer not displayed?
• Which payment methods are supported?
• Get maximum benefits using ReSell

Updated on: 11/09/2026