Adjusting Payment Date for Subscription Products

Site URL: https://www.funicularmagazine.com/shop/funicular-infinite

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me because I may have just screwed myself big time. I'm an editor of a literary magazine and our team decided that instead of selling traditional subscriptions that require manual renewals each year, we would move to using Squarespace subscription products to streamline the whole process. The problem we're having is that we were under the assumption that the date customers are charged was tied to when the product was posted, not when the person ordered. 

To explain further, we release issues three times per year. Let's say we release an issue on Oct. 1 and Customer A orders on Oct 1, we send them the current issue. They are informed that four months later (Feb. 1) they will be charged for the next issue and we will send it to them. That's our ideal set up. However, when Customer B orders on Nov 1, they will also get the current issue that Customer A received, but their renewal date is four months from their purchase date (Mar. 1). This is one month after the second issue releases. 

Basically, anyone who buys a subscription after the day the issue releases will get it late because the charge date can't be changed. This isn't ideal and not how magazine subscriptions work. Is there any way to consolidate every order to a single date so that all customers are charged on the same date every four months no matter when they placed their order? Right now you can't move the charge date sooner, only later, which doesn't help. It's left us in a position where we either just mail them when their order is due, creating a scenario where subscribers will receive issues at different times or we ship them all at the same time and wait for the charges to occur when they're scheduled and risk people cancelling before a payment has been taken out for the latest issue.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

I'm at a loss! My company sells a subscription product and I want to be able to charge recurring customers on the same day each month (instead of just one month from their initial sign up). Squarespace doesn't offer this feature. Are there any customizations I can use? 

I was just wondering the same thing, which is how I wound up here. have you found a way to achieve this yet?

On 3/9/2021 at 7:39 AM, Jtm said:

I was just wondering the same thing, which is how I wound up here. have you found a way to achieve this yet?

@Jtm - so far the only solution I've found is the one Paul gave above....

On 3/9/2021 at 12:15 AM, paul2009 said:

Unfortunately, this is a known limitation. As you say, subscriptions won't start on a single billing date per month, but you can manually delay each new subscription so that they become aligned after purchase.  For the benefit of others who read this post, you can do this in Home > Profiles > Customers:

• Find and click the customer whose subscription you want to delay.
• Click Reschedule order date. 
• Select the new renewal date.
• Click Save. 
• Click Continue.

There are still known limitations with Squarespace Subscriptions, and I've documented a few of them in a post about Commerce limitations in June 2018. If you want to lobby Squarespace for improvements to subscriptions - or anything else - I recommend opening a ticket through Customer Support because this is how they manage feature requests.

I thought about this, but I don't see how it can work. Squarespace only allows you to change your order date forward from the current interval. So if a customer subscribes one month after the issue is released, I can't align their order with the release date of the next issue, only four months after their order date (which is, again, one month after the release date). The best I can do is align their orders two issues in advance, but then I won't be able to charge them for the issue I skip over. 

There's really no solution to this and, paired with the fact that customers have to UNsubscribe to change their email/shipping details, I'm dumbfounded as to why SS released their subscription service in this state and haven't communicated any updates to it.

On 3/8/2021 at 11:15 PM, paul2009 said:

Unfortunately, this is a known limitation. As you say, subscriptions won't start on a single billing date per month, but you can manually delay each new subscription so that they become aligned after purchase.  For the benefit of others who read this post, you can do this in Home > Profiles > Customers:

• Find and click the customer whose subscription you want to delay.
• Click Reschedule order date. 
• Select the new renewal date.
• Click Save. 
• Click Continue.

There are still known limitations with Squarespace Subscriptions, and I've documented a few of them in a post about Commerce limitations in June 2018. If you want to lobby Squarespace for improvements to subscriptions - or anything else - I recommend opening a ticket through Customer Support because this is how they manage feature requests.

@paul2009 hi there - any updates to this need? I found your post via Circle but it's been several months and perhaps SQSP has updated this? Thanks!

1 hour ago, EpicPlaydate said:

any updates to this need?

This isn’t likely to change in the short to medium term. 

Hiya, Is there a way of changing your customers subscription date - so they all requirer on the same date?

Right now payments for subscription come out here there and everywhere within the month.

We are a monthly subscriptions and it would help us massively to be able to manage orders if they were all alined for the payment to come out on the same day of the month? Is there anyway of changing the date of subscription once they have signed up?

All the best 

3 hours ago, chalkpitrecords said:

Is there a way of changing your customers subscription date - so they all requirer on the same date?

See my answer above.

Does anyone know of any SS extensions that might help with this? Or if integrating WooCommerce may be a solution at all?

1 hour ago, hannah.dossary said:

Does anyone know of any SS extensions that might help with this?

Nothing cannot change the way Squarespace subscriptions function. As I explained above, you can manually delay each new subscription so that they become aligned after purchase but you cannot choose when subscriptions start.