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Comment by drchiu | Hacker News Reader

Subscriptions is now available as part of their API. It does require a bit of time* to understand it though.

* - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL

*API

But not natively within Shopify's UI, You have to use 3rd party apps have to make use of this API. For merchants this is useless to them if they don't want to use a 3rd party app for this feature.

We just built our own subscriptions on the Subscription API and it is extremely thin. Just a few gripes that I had to build around: 1. The "SubscriptionContract" isn't much of a contract at all. You can set a subscription to cancelled but still bill against it for example. 2. It keeps track of a "next billing date" but it does not bill the customer for you like Stripe does, you have to keep track of the next billing date and attempt to bill against the contract yourself.

Is this subscription api suitable for digital only businesses that have say a membership system?.

Last time I checked most of the shopify apps out there are not suited to this.

Are you thinking for digital products like a PDF or purely for membership access?

When you create a billing attempt against a subscription, it creates a Shopify order that is tied to that subscription. You could definitely have the order be tied to a digital product.

While you could definitely make it work for a membership system, I think I'd recommend literally anything else. Happy to elaborate or answer any specific questions you might have.

What would you recommend for a membership system, thinking about this route since waiting for Shopify's subscription API's to mature but time isn't on my side on this.

If you're not already in the Shopify ecosystem, I'd look at Stripe Subscriptions with Checkout which requires a small amount of development that lives in something like a lambda or netlify function. - https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/checkout - https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/07/13/manage-subscriptions...

If you want something out of the box, there are tools like Memberful, Gumroad, etc that take quite a vig on top of the payment processing.

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