Editing subscriptions
Once a customer purchases a subscription made with the Seal Subscriptions app in your store, they should get billed on the set renewal dates for the bought subscription products. However, what if the customer isn't satisfied with their subscription? What if they wish to edit their subscription products, change the subscription intervals, skip a renewal, pause or cancel the subscription? That's where the Seal Subscriptions Customer portal comes in.
Customer portal
The customer portal is a page, where your customers, who have at least one subscription from your store, can manage and edit their subscriptions. When a customer visits their customer portal, they should be able to see all of the important information regarding their subscription. On top of the customer portal page there should be the “subscription” section, that states, when their subscription was created, the subscription's status, which can either be active or canceled and the subscription intervals, which represent the intervals between the subscription billing dates.
Below the “Subscription” section should be the “Items” section, where the customers should be able to view, add and remove their subscription products. If the customers are able to edit the products in their “Items” section and if so, which products the customers are able to add depends on your app settings.
If you have the settings enabled, customers should can even add “One-time” purchase products to their subscription. These One-time purchase products should get removed from the subscription, after their next subscription renewal.
Below the “Items” section should be the “Delivery cost” section, where your customers can see their subscription's delivery cost.
Lastly, at the bottom of the page, there should be the “Billing schedule”, where the customers should be able to see their past and upcoming scheduled billing attempts. Depending on your app settings, you can allow the customers to skip their upcoming billing attempts here.
On the right side of the Customer portal, your customers should be able to see their name, the e-mail address they used to purchase their subscription and their shipping information. Next to their contact and shipping information are the “Edit buttons”, which can be used by the customer to update their information. The “Edit” buttons can be turned off, if you don't wish for the customers to change their information. Their shipping information isn't displayed, if they have purchased a “digital” subscription, as they didn't need to provide any shipping address on the checkout page.
Below the “customer's info” section, there is a discount section, where the customers are able to add an additional discount codes to their subscription, if they are provided with a discount code that is configured to apply on subscription purchases.
Lastly, there is a “Payment method section” and two buttons, for pausing and canceling the subscription. In the Payment method section, the customer is able to see the card they used, when they have purchased the subscription. On the top-right corner, there is an “Edit” button, where the customer can can change their billing information. When they click on the “Edit button”, and automated email is sent to their e-mail address, where they can safely and securely update their credit cart information.
Beneath the “Payment method” section, your customers should be able to see the “Pause my subscription” and “Cancel my subscription" buttons. Again, these buttons can be hidden within your app settings, or triggered to appear, after a certain subscription renewal.
Accessing the customer portal
If your customer has an account in your shop, then the customer will be able to view subscriptions by logging into their account and going to /a/subscriptions/manage URL in your shop.
If the customer doesn't have an account in your shop, then they can still view, edit and cancel their subscription through the link they receive in each subscription email.
You can turn on a functionality which will add this link to the account page automatically in Seal Subscriptions > Settings > Customer portal > Access to customer portal > Automatically inject link to customer portal to the customer account menu. But if the link doesn't show up even after you turn this on, then you can follow our instructions on how to manually add the link to your account menu here: https://www.sealsubscriptions.com/articles/add-link-to-subscriptions-list.
Customers can also access their subscriptions by requesting an email with a magic link which leads to all of their subscriptions. The form where they can request such email is accessible on /a/subscriptions/login if you enable it in Seal Subscription -> Settings -> General Settings.
When customers create a subscription, they also receive an email with a magic link, which they can always use to access their subscription. Just make sure that you have this email notification turned on in Seal Subscriptions > Settings > Notifications.
Customer portal settings
If you wish to manage, what customers are able to see and edit within their subscriptions, you can go to: Seal Subscriptions > Settings > Customer portal.
The first tab of the "Customer portal settings" is Product editing, where you can enable the following features:
- Customers can change product quantity
- Customers can add/remove products
- Enable product editing mode by default
- Customers can only add products which are included in subscription rules
- Customers can add one-time products
- Prevent customers from adding out of stock products
- Apply subscription discounts on newly added products
- Customers cannot edit their subscription until they reach the minimum number of payments
- Remove discounts from discount codes on each product edit (quantity or product change)
- Apply bundle discounts from Bundler when customer edits their subscription
Below the “Product editing” tab, you should be able to find “Subscription editing" tab, that has these listed features, which you can enable:
- Allow customers to change subscription interval
- Update product prices and discounts on interval change
- Allow customers to reschedule an upcoming payment
- Reset the rest of the schedule after customer reschedules a payment
- Allow customers to change their email address
- Allow customers to change their shipping and billing addresses
- Show PAUSE button in the customer portal
- Show CANCEL button in the customer portal
- Show text explaining why cancel/pause button is not showing up
- Allow customers to edit notes on their subscriptions
- Allow customers to skip an upcoming payment
- Prevent skipping payments if minimum number of payments wasn't yet reached
- Allow customers to charge themselves at any time
- Ask customers if they want to reset the schedule after charging themselves manually
- Disable the Place order now button if one or more products are out of stock
- Allow customers to retry failed payments at any time
- Allow customers to apply a discount code
- Allow customers to stack discount codes
- Charge customers immediately after they reactivate/resume their subscription
- Allow customers to request an invoice at any time
The next tab is “Access to customer portal”, where you can enable the before listed features for accessing the customer portal. These features are:
- Show help text for accessing subscriptions from the account login page
- Enable customer portal login form in your shop
- Show button to view/edit subscription on subscriptions list
- Automatically inject link to customer portal to the customer account menu
The next four tabs on the Customer portal settings are more visual settings, which allow you to set your desired colors for each of the customer portal elements. The first of the four tabs are “colors” in general. There you should se a variety of color swatches for different customer portal elements.
The next one allows you to enable the “Back buttons” and set up colors for said buttons.
The tab after that is for the “Date and Time picker ” settings. These settings only affect the calendar, which only appears, if a customer reschedules a future billing attempt within their customer portal.
The last of the four tabs allows you to set up “Loyalty discount colors”. This only affects how the Loyalty discount feature gets displayed on the customer portal. Lastly on the list, there are “Other” settings, which include the “Maximum number of old billing attempts”, which can get displayed on the subscription billing schedule, “Date and time format”, where you can choose, how the dates get displayed and the "Customer portal header", where you can choose to write some text, that will get displayed on the header of the customer portal.
CSS styling of the Customer portal
If you wish to edit the look and functionality of the customer portal even further, you should be able to edit the styling with the help of some CSS. The CSS can be edited, by going to: Seal Subscriptions > Settings > General Settings > Advanced > Custom CSS for customer portal.
However, it is suggested that you only use this feature, if you have at least some knowledge of CSS. If you don't know how to edit CSS, I would advise you to contact a store developer or a Shopify Expert.
conclusion
In conclusion, the Seal Subscriptions app leaves a lot of room for subscription customization. There are plenty of in-app options, that allow merchants to control, which settings get displayed for their customers and which do not, so the subscriptions can range from almost entirely customizable to fixed subscriptions, that only the merchant can control.