Rolling/Unending Subscriptions

Rolling/Unending Subscriptions

GrownBy can support an unending subscription. This article will help you learn how to set up and manage such a subscription. We will walk through some of the foundational decisions that you have to make to determine how best to set it up in GrownBy. 

GrownBy does not have “automatic rollover” built into the platform. We do not allow customers to be automatically re-enrolled from one subscription to the next. However, it is possible, with your customers’ awareness and consent, to order for them, charge their card, and create the effect of an unending subscription. Moving customers along to keep them enrolled will require some manual order creation for the Farm Admin. We’ll walk you through that process in this article. 

You may also decide that you would like to require your customers to reorder themselves.

In GrownBy, we recommend that an unending schedule have end dates in common for customers to ease the administrative burden of creating orders. For example, we don’t recommend you set up a schedule where customers can sign-up for a 52-week share any week of the year. However, GrownBy works great for a 52-week (or other length) term that automatically pro-rates for customers at the time of ordering when they order after the start date.  

Rollover Policy Communication

If you will be rolling customers over to a new subscription and charging their card on file, you’ll want to make sure that you have their consent to do so. Your specific method of communications will depend on your business but here are some ideas of how you could ensure that your customers are fully informed that their subscription at your farm is rolling/unending:

  1. Add descriptive language to your product name and description that explains that the expectation is that customers will be re-enrolled in your program until they opt out
  2. Provide customers with a clear way of opting out:
    1. You could ask them to reach out to you directly (email, phone, text)
    2. You could also provide a brief form (with Google Forms or another form-creation service) to allow them to opt out
  3. Email your customers before the rollover time and inform them that you will be rolling them over
  4. Remember, once you create a new order for a customer, that customer will receive notifications related to the order. You can review customer notifications here. 

Number of Weeks

The first decision you’ll need to make is how many weeks you would like the subscription to be for. Factors that will affect this decision are:

  1. How frequently or infrequently you would like to re-order for your customers or require customers to reorder
  2. Your marketing strategy:
    1. How many weeks you think you’re most likely to be able to sell at once (if you use a Standard Product vs. a Subscription; read more below)
    2. What you would like the “pay-in-full” price to be for the subscription (read more below)

Once you have made this decision, you can set-up your schedule (below). 

How to Set Up Your Schedule 

Note: In the case that your share is 52 weeks long, “Year Round” Schedules in GrownBy will only allow ordering 52 weeks in advance of the order date. If you want customers to be able to order a 52 week product that starts later than their order date, use a “Seasonal Schedule”. 

See the next section for more conversation about when to use Year Round schedules. This is the screen where you select the schedule type. You will not be able to change it once you’ve created it:



Schedules for unending subscriptions can be very long which will mean that you don’t need to adjust or recreate them very often. However, you can adjust the dates of the schedule at any time (like when you are coming to the end of an ordering season and need to reinitiate ordering for the next year). 

Create a Schedule that is “Seasonal” with a long date range. In this example, we made a weekly schedule that stretches from 2023 to 2031:

If you will be using a standard product instead of a subscription product (because you need it to be SNAP eligible or you want it to be more flexible for your customers), you will want to set a schedule that aligns with the number of weeks you would like the customer to order for. Otherwise, in the above example, customers could order for any number of weeks of a standard product and your end dates will not align for all customers. 

Uses for Year-Round Schedules

There are situations where you might want to use year round schedules. Examples might include a farm store that is open all the time but doesn't need to have purchases made far in advance. Same with a year-round farmers market. Even a year-round CSA distribution that had distinct shares available in the winter, spring, summer, or fall would/could use a year-round schedule! It is really only in the case of a 52-week-long subscription that a seasonal schedule is the only choice available to you. 

Payments for Standard vs Subscription Products

While pay-in-full options work the same for both types of products, Standard and Subscription Products have different behaviors when it comes to installment payment. 

Standard products that are paid on a “per pick-up basis” get charged to the card on file at the beginning of the day when the distribution is set to take place. As mentioned above, with standard products, you will want a schedule that aligns with the product availability and the number of weeks you want the customer to order for. 

This is the customer view for check-out when they are purchasing a standard product and can select per-pickup payments:



You will need to use Standard products if you want your product to be SNAP/EBT-eligible (SNAP/EBT rules require payment at the time of purchase). You may also want to use Standard products if you want to give your customers complete control over the dates they select vs prescribing a schedule to them (daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly). 

Subscription installment payments work differently than those for standard products and will depend on whether they are weekly or monthly, when you set your final installment date, what your deposit is (if any), etc. GrownBy will divide the Order balance (minus any deposit amount) among the available payment dates (weekly or monthly up until the final date) and then create invoices for each payment. 

You can choose whether to allow Monthly or weekly or both types of payments when you set up your subscription: 



Here is a customer view with both options available:



Please take a look at this article about subscription payment or reach out to us if you have any questions!

Subscriptions Products for Long-Term or Rolling Shares (recommended)

Unless you need to use Standard Products because of SNAP/EBT or date flexibility, we recommend that you use a subscription to set up your unending share because they are easier to order for the customer and easier to administer for you. They also tend to encourage customers to order for more dates at once. You can set the number of pick-ups for the subscription however you’d like based on how you’d like it to appear in the shop and how often you’d like to re-order for customers. 

Note: It is also possible and sometimes ideal to use both types of products. See the example of River Queen Greens here: https://grownby.app/farms/farmid-4012738/shop

One Product vs New Products for New Time Frames

It is possible to use the same product for each time period of your subscription and simply rename it to indicate to customers that it now represents a different time period. 

However, if you need customers to be able to order from the previous time period and the coming time period at the same time, you must use separate products to do so. You can simply copy the existing product and edit it.

You will do this from the product editing screen by clicking the three dots below “Action” to the right of the product and selecting “Copy.” Then, you can edit the copied product with your new dates. It looks like this:





Tracking and Updating Your Customers’ Orders

When it comes time to rollover a group of customers, use your existing list of customers to create new orders for the new shares. You can view the customers for a given share by going to the Customers page on your dashboard and filtering your view for the Product and Schedule that is relevant: 




If the customer has a credit card on file and has agreed to the new share, you can charge the card on file. If you have chosen weekly or monthly installments, the card you have chosen will be automatically charged when each of those invoices comes due.

As always, please feel free to reach out to us to discuss the specifics of your farm’s set-up!

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact support@grownby.app or schedule a time to talk with us here!






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