The settings panel in your subscription app is where the customer experience is shaped. Defaults set here propagate to every plan, every checkout, every dunning email, and every customer portal session. Most stores configure once at launch and revisit every quarter as the business evolves.
The settings that matter most
Across Shopify subscription apps (Joy, Recharge, Seal, and others), the highest-impact settings are roughly the same:
- Default frequency. Which option is pre-selected on the product page (every 30 days vs 60 days vs monthly). This single choice can shift subscribe rate by 10–20%.
- One-time vs subscribe default. Whether the subscribe option is selected by default or the one-time option is. Default-selecting subscribe usually lifts subscribe rate 30–50%.
- Customer portal permissions. What can subscribers do without contacting support — pause, skip, swap, change frequency, change products, change billing date, cancel. More self-service = lower support load and lower churn.
- Dunning configuration. Retry schedule for failed payments, dunning email cadence, when to mark a subscription as canceled. Smart dunning recovers 5–10% of revenue that would otherwise be lost.
- Cancel flow. Whether to ask for a reason, whether to offer alternatives, what discounts are available as save offers.
- Notifications. Renewal reminder emails, upcoming-shipment alerts, payment-failed notices, etc.
Defaults that work well for most Shopify stores
- Subscribe default-selected on the product page, with one-time as the secondary option.
- Middle frequency (usually every 30 days for consumables, every 60 for less-frequent products) pre-selected.
- Customer portal: pause, skip, swap, frequency change all enabled. Cancel always enabled, but routed through a cancel flow.
- Smart retries enabled: 3 attempts over 10 days for failed payments, with email at each step.
- Cancel flow on: reason capture required, with relevant alternatives offered per reason.
Settings that depend on your category
Some configurations vary heavily by product type:
- Replenishment (vitamins, coffee, pet) → emphasize frequency flexibility and skip; offer prepaid for committed customers.
- Boxes → emphasize prepay (locks in revenue against monthly cancel temptation); usually disable frequency change since the product is "monthly themed box."
- Memberships → emphasize annual billing; usually disable pause/skip (membership is always-on).
To see Joy's settings configured on a live store, you can preview the merchant dashboard and walk through each configuration option.