Subscription order activities explained
When you have a subscription integration connected to your loyalty program, you will be given the option to set up a
reward activity for those who place subscription orders specifically.
This allows you to run promotions like double stamps, for subscription customers or only offer stamps to customers that
have subscribed, and normal one-time orders will not get stamps for their purchases.
How it works
Subscription only activity
If you run the subscription order activity on its own, so that only subscription purchases can collect stamps, then we
will be able to assign the stamps as needed without any changes.
Normal order activity and subscription order activity
When you decide to offer stamps for both types of orders one-time and subscription we have to do some extra work in the
background.
New orders (first time subscriptions)
When a new order first comes in, Shopify treats it as a regular order in the background. So we have to mark it as a
normal order – reward the customer with the stamps set in the normal order activity. Then we do some magic in the
background, to work out if this order is a normal order or a first time subscription order.
If we notice that the order should be a subscription one, then we replace the normal order for the subscription one and
if there is a stamp amount difference, we will change this and update the customers total stamps.
The customer will likely not notice anything on their side, as these checks usually happen within a 10 – 20 seconds of
each other.
The caveat.
The one thing we don’t change at the moment is the email notification that goes out. So if a customer does order a first
time subscription order, they will get the email for the regular order activity and how many stamps are awarded for
that.
This is because, we queue our emails at the point when the activity is created. So when a customer orders and you have
notifications turned on, we will queue that email with the current data we have at the time for that order.
When the order is then updated, because we “swap” the activity, we decide not to send out another email for the new sub
order activity being rewarded as this might confuse customers to get to emails within a minute of each other.
We are working on a better flow for this, and will likely delay order emails going out for a few minutes in the future
to be able to make sure.
This caveat is because Shopify decide to mark the first order with no data to suggest it is actually a first time
subscription order. We rely on the subscription apps to send over additional information but this usually happens
about 20 seconds after the order.