Skip to main content
Learn how selling plans and selling plan groups work in Firmhouse with Shopify. Selling plans are the objects used to power your subscription logic. They define the frequency of the customer’s subscription, the discount applied to the product when bought on subscription with the plan compared to its one-time price, and the minimum commitment terms applied to the subscription when the customer signs up with the plan.

​
Selling Plans

You can create and manage your plans in the Firmhouse portal under the Plans menu. Plans Menu For each plan you create, you have several configuration options. Plan Configuration Options

​
Plan Identifier

The Plan name is used in the PDP widget of your Shopify store. The Slug is used as a plan identifier along with the plan ID.

​
Pricing Strategy

The Strategy dictates the subscription discount compared to the one-off price. This can be defined in one of three ways:
  • Percentage discount (e.g., 10% off for subscription)
  • Absolute value (e.g., 5 EUR off subscriptions)
  • Fixed price - used when you want to charge the same fixed price for any product purchased on the plan. We recommend using this option only for membership propositions where the customer pays the same amount recurrently to receive access to certain services.
In the pricing strategy, you can also set the Applies to property which dictates when the discount strategy is applied:
  • Recurring only - only to subscription products
  • One-time purchases - only to one-off items added to the subscription
  • All - all products in the subscription will get a discount (whether they are a subscription product or one-time add-on)

​
Products Shipment Frequency

The shipment frequency dictates how often the customer is charged and should receive an order.

​
Anchor dates and cutoff days

If your plan uses anchor dates, Firmhouse schedules the first subscription order on the next available anchor date. For example, a weekly plan anchored to Monday creates orders for Mondays. When you also use cutoff days, Firmhouse checks whether the billing date for that anchor has already passed. A future delivery can still be selected when its billing date is today, but deliveries scheduled for today are skipped. For example, with a Monday delivery anchor and a 7-day cutoff:
  • A customer who signs up on Monday, June 15, gets their first scheduled order on Monday, June 22.
  • On a weekly plan, the next billing date is June 22.
  • On a biweekly plan, the next billing date is June 29, one week before the following Monday delivery on July 6.
  • A customer who signs up on Tuesday, June 16, gets their first scheduled order on Monday, June 29 because the June 22 billing cutoff date has already passed.

​
Contract Terms

The contract terms define the period during which the customer cannot cancel their subscription to this specific plan.
Warning: Any changes made to the plan configuration after customers have already signed up with the plan will only apply to NEW subscribers. Existing customers will continue their subscriptions according to the plan configuration in place at the moment of signup.

​
Selling Plan Groups

For a simple subscription proposition where all products can be paired with every available plan (e.g., 15% off all subscriptions), simply creating plans in the Ungrouped Plans section is sufficient. Ungrouped Plans However, there are cases where you might want to define specific plans for specific products. For example, if you sell shampoo and soap in your store, you might want to offer a different discount for shampoo subscriptions as opposed to the soap discounts. Similarly, you might want the shampoo product collection to have access to a frequency selection different from the soap product collection. In this situation, you would:
  1. Create two plan groups: Shampoo and Soap
  2. Create the plans with the discounts you want to offer for each collection

​
Create a Selling Plan Group

To create a selling plan group, use the Create Plan Group button. Create Plan Group Button You will then be able to:
  1. Configure the selling plan group name (not visible to the customers)
  2. Search for products that should belong to the plan
  3. Select the relevant products for the plan
Configure Plan Group 1 In the newly created plan group, you can use the + button to create the selling plans that should apply to products in that group. Addplan

​
When a subscription option disappears from a Shopify product

If a subscription option no longer appears on a Shopify product page after products or variants were changed, first check whether the visible Shopify variant still belongs to the correct selling plan group. This can happen when a product is replaced, a subscription variant is removed, or a one-time-purchase variant is renamed to become the main product variant. The Firmhouse widget only shows the selling plans that are available for the selected Shopify variant. If the remaining variant is not included in the selling plan group, the product can look like it is no longer connected to Firmhouse. To resolve this:
  1. Open the selling plan group in Firmhouse.
  2. Check which Shopify product or variant is selected for the group.
  3. Add the current visible Shopify variant to the selling plan group.
  4. Save the group and refresh the product page.
After the variant is included in the selling plan group again, the subscription option should reappear on the product page.

​
Adding products outside the plan group (from the admin portal)

When a subscription has a plan that belongs to a plan group, customers can only add products that are allocated to that plan group in the Self Service Center. When adding products from the admin portal, you can override this and select any product, including those outside the plan group. Products outside the plan group are labeled in the product search, and a warning appears when you select one—you can still add it manually. See Add or remove products from a subscription for details.

​
Deleting a Plan

A plan can only be deleted when it has no active or pending subscribers. As long as customers are subscribed to a plan, the Delete option is disabled in the portal and the plan cannot be removed. This protects subscribers from having their plan configuration removed while their subscription is still running. The same rule applies to selling plan groups: a plan group can only be deleted once every plan inside it can be deleted. To remove a plan that still has subscribers, the subscriptions on it first need to end. There are two ways to reach this:
  1. Wait for the existing subscriptions on the plan to end.
  2. Cancel the affected subscriptions and have those customers sign up again on the correct plan. See Cancelling a subscription.
Once a plan has no more active or pending subscribers, it can be deleted.

​
Hiding a Plan Without Deleting It

There are cases where you want a plan to stop appearing to customers but cannot delete it because it still has subscribers. In this situation, you can move the plan out of view instead of deleting it. Plans in the Ungrouped Plans section apply to all of your subscription products, so an ungrouped plan is shown on every product. A plan inside a selling plan group only applies to the products assigned to that group. To hide a plan from your storefront:
  1. Create a new plan group and do not assign any products to it.
  2. Move the plan into that empty plan group.
Use the drag handle on the left side of the plan row to move the plan into the empty group. Drag handle for moving a plan into a different group Because the plan group has no products, the plan is no longer connected to any product and stops appearing on your product pages. Existing subscriptions on the plan are not affected.
Note: This change is applied to your Shopify storefront through a background sync and may take a short while to take effect.

​
Where Are Selling Plans and Selling Plan Groups Visible?

Selling plan groups are only visible to you in the configuration pages, within Firmhouse and Shopify. Selling plan information is also visible to customers. They will see the selling plan name in the widget on your PDP, cart, and checkout. You will want to give the plans suggestive names for this reason. When one or more plans in the same Shopify selling-plan setup use contract terms, Shopify can also show a Contract terms option alongside the selling plan details. The value lists the configured minimum and/or maximum term for that plan. Plan Name Visible To Customers Example of a selling plan name: “Pay Quarterly, Get Monthly” as shown to customers on the product page.