More than 50% of online shoppers are subscribed to an ecommerce subscription service, and many merchants have used the Shopify platform to build ecommerce juggernauts thanks to its simplicity and many integrations  .

However, building successful subscription businesses requires understanding Shopify’s full capabilities and limitations. 

Shopify works best when combined with specialized subscription management tools that handle complex billing scenarios, help reduce involuntary churn, and provide detailed subscription analytics. 

Learn how to build, launch, and scale subscription businesses using Shopify as your foundation, including specific apps, integrations, and when to upgrade to dedicated subscription platforms for serious growth.

Key takeaways

  • Shopify is a strong foundation, not a complete solution: Shopify provides an excellent, user-friendly platform for launching a business, handling the storefront, product catalog, and basic payments. However, it has significant limitations for scaling.

  • Native Shopify features have key limitations: Relying solely on Shopify's native tools leads to challenges in advanced billing (e.g., usage-based), payment recovery, churn analysis, plan management, and customer retention campaigns, which can significantly impact revenue.

  • Successful brands use a hybrid approach: Leading ecommerce brands pair Shopify's powerful storefront with specialized subscription management platforms. This allows them to configure membership plans, automate payment recovery, and access detailed analytics like customer lifetime value (LTV) and churn rates.

What is Shopify, and how does it help subscriptions?

Shopify is a platform that helps ecommerce businesses create stores and process payments. For subscriptions, Shopify handles the website, product catalog, and basic recurring billing.

Shopify stands out as a powerful and accessible launchpad for businesses. Its user-friendly interface, robust e-commerce foundation, and extensive app ecosystem make introducing both one-time purchases and subscriptions a relatively straightforward endeavor. The platform's flexibility allows companies to address complexity as it arises through strategic integrations and specialized tools.

The most successful subscription businesses on Shopify recognize that sustained growth requires purpose-built solutions for advanced subscription management. While Shopify handles the storefront and inventory exceptionally well, scaling companies typically integrate dedicated subscription platforms like Recurly Commerce to manage complex billing scenarios, sophisticated dunning workflows, and comprehensive customer lifecycle management.

Why are subscription businesses important in ecommerce today?

Subscription models drive predictable revenue, faster growth, and stronger customer retention than traditional one-time purchases ecommerce.

The numbers show why subscriptions have become essential for ecommerce success:

  • In 2025, subscription businesses are projected to grow at 18% per year, which is 3.75x faster than the S&P 500's estimated 4.8% revenue growth

  • Acquiring new customers costs 5-25 times more than retaining existing customers

5 Benefits of using Shopify for subscriptions

Shopify offers several key advantages for subscription businesses, combining proven ecommerce infrastructure with flexible subscription capabilities that grow with your business.

1. Proven ecommerce foundation

Shopify's infrastructure supports subscription operations through PCI-compliant payment processing, automatic security updates, and built-in legal compliance features like GDPR tools and tax calculations. The platform handles technical requirements like SSL certificates, hosting reliability, and payment security without requiring dedicated IT resources.

2. Unified customer experience

Customers can manage both subscription and one-time purchases through single accounts, reducing friction for businesses with hybrid product catalogs. This unified approach allows customers to view order history, update payment methods, and manage subscriptions alongside regular purchases in one dashboard.

3. Scalable infrastructure

The platform handles subscription volume growth without technical management requirements, automatically scaling to support increased transaction volumes and traffic spikes. Shopify's global CDN and server infrastructure maintain performance as subscription businesses grow from hundreds to thousands of subscribers.

4. Extensive app ecosystem

Third-party apps add subscription features that aren't built into the platform, like AI-powered retry logic, customer portals, and detailed reporting. Recurly Commerce provides the subscription management tools that native features simply can't handle.

5. Payment processing options

Global payment method support includes regional preferences like SEPA Direct Debit in Europe, local payment methods in Asia, and alternative payment options that increase subscription conversion rates across different markets and customer segments.

If you want to know the latest insights on the ecommerce subscription industry, regardless of the platform, check out our guide here:

Shopify for subscriptions vs traditional ecommerce platforms

Using Shopify for subscriptions differs from traditional ecommerce approaches by combining proven ecommerce infrastructure with subscription capabilities, creating a foundation that supports both business models simultaneously.

  • Low-lift launch: Launching subscriptions for those already on the Shopify platform can be straightforward and easier to implement than other platforms that require heavy investment in technology expertise.

  • Checkout conversion and trust factors: Shopify's optimized checkout process achieves higher conversion rates than most custom-built platforms, with customers recognizing and trusting the familiar Shopify checkout experience. This trust factor becomes crucial for subscription signups where customers commit to recurring payments.

  • Unified commerce capability: Shopify excels at combining subscription and one-time purchases in a single cart, allowing customers to mix regular products with subscription items. This flexibility increases average order value and provides more monetization options than subscription-only platforms.

  • Reliability and uptime: Shopify maintains 99.98% uptime compared to smaller platforms that often struggle with reliability during traffic spikes. This stability becomes critical for subscription businesses that depend on consistent billing cycles and customer access.

  • Integration ecosystem: Shopify's app ecosystem provides thousands of integrations for marketing, analytics, and customer service tools that subscription businesses need, while smaller platforms typically offer limited third-party connections.

How Shopify functions for subscription businesses

Shopify provides basic solid functionality through its native API and integrations, but requires third-party apps to handle advanced subscription business needs.

  • Shopify Subscriptions API: Supports weekly, monthly, and annual billing frequencies but lacks complex billing cycles like quarterly or custom intervals. The API handles basic recurring payments but cannot manage usage-based billing or tiered pricing structures.

  • Customer portal capabilities: Native self-service options are limited to basic subscription viewing. Most merchants integrate solutions like Recurly Commerce to provide customers with comprehensive self-service portals, including pause, skip, and cancellation controls.

  • ShopPay integration: Works with recurring billing for faster checkout experiences, but doesn't support subscription features like payment method updates or dunning management for failed payments.

  • Shopify Flow automation: Allows basic subscription workflow automation like inventory alerts and customer tagging, but cannot handle complex subscription lifecycle events or advanced retention campaigns.

  • Native analytics: Provides basic recurring revenue tracking but lacks essential subscription metrics like churn rates, cohort analysis, or lifetime value calculations that subscription businesses need for decision-making.

  • Payment gateway compatibility: Supports recurring billing through major gateways like Stripe and PayPal, but advanced payment optimization and recovery features require additional subscription management platforms.

  • Inventory management: Offers basic stock tracking but doesn't include subscription-specific forecasting that accounts for recurring order patterns and delivery schedules.

How leading ecommerce brands scale subscriptions on Shopify

Leading brands combine Shopify's ecommerce foundation with specialized subscription platforms like Recurly Commerce to solve problems that native Shopify features cannot address.

Here's what these companies do differently:

  • Track the right numbers: Monitor churn rates, lifetime value, and revenue recovery instead of just focusing on new signups, providing clearer pictures of subscription business health.

  • Automated payment fixes: Use systems that retry failed payments and send dunning emails without manual work, reducing involuntary churn that can cost 1-4% of total revenue.

  • Flexible pricing: Test different price points and billing cycles based on what customers actually want, rather than being locked into Shopify's limited pricing options.

  • Better reporting: Get detailed analytics on subscriber behavior instead of just Shopify reports, enabling data-driven decisions about retention and growth strategies.

The biggest challenges in implementing Shopify for subscriptions

While Shopify provides solid ecommerce infrastructure, businesses face significant limitations when relying solely on native subscription tools that can affect revenue and operations.

Limited payment recovery capabilities

Shopify's basic payment retry system can't recover failed payments as well as dedicated solutions. When a payment fails, you need AI-driven retry schedules and targeted dunning campaigns to win back those customers - features that require specialized tools. 

Basic subscription management features

Shopify's native API cannot handle complex billing scenarios that come with subscriptions, forcing businesses to invest in additional tools or limit their subscription offerings.

Insufficient retention and analytics tools

Native Shopify lacks churn tools, cohort analysis, and automated retention campaigns that subscription businesses need. Its reporting cannot identify at-risk subscribers or provide insights into customer lifetime value patterns.

Manual customer service requirements

Subscription management through native Shopify requires manual intervention for common requests like pausing, skipping, or modifying subscriptions. This is unsustainable for businesses as they scale into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Limited revenue optimization

Shopify lacks native A/B testing and experimentation tools for offers and pricing. Businesses cannot easily test different trial periods, pricing tiers, or promotional campaigns without third-party tools or custom development work.

Why Recurly is the best solution for Shopify subscription management

Recurly Commerce powers greater growth for you by extending Shopify through specialized features designed specifically for subscription businesses, while maintaining the familiar Shopify experience that customers expect.

  • Shopify integration and checkout experience: Recurly has a native Shopify app available in the Shopify App Store that integrates seamlessly with existing stores. The platform maintains Shopify's optimized checkout experience, including ShopPay, ensuring customers don't face unfamiliar payment flows that could reduce conversion rates. Integration with Shopify Flow enables automated workflows between subscription events and store operations.

  • Advanced payment recovery: While Shopify offers basic retry logic, Recurly provides retry logic that employs machine learning using data from billions of transactions to increase the chances of successful payments and sophisticated dunning campaigns that recover revenue lost to failed payments. These capabilities address the revenue loss that basic Shopify retries cannot prevent.

  • Comprehensive billing model support: Recurly supports both digital and physical subscriptions with advanced billing models like usage-based pricing, tiered structures, and hybrid subscriptions that Shopify's native API cannot handle. This flexibility allows businesses to test different pricing strategies without custom development.

  • Enhanced analytics and retention tools: Recurly provides advanced subscription analytics including churn prediction, cohort analysis, and automated retention campaigns. The platform includes advanced dunning capabilities that go beyond Shopify's basic retry settings, with Recurly continually adding new retention tools for reducing subscriber churn.

Improve your ecommerce business with a demo of Recurly Commerce