Subscriptions

How to generate scheduled recurring orders from a source order

Subscriptions allow merchants to offer regular purchases of a product or group of products, resulting in predictable, recurring revenue and increasing both acquisition and retention. A flexible subscription model provides an affordable way for consumers to access what they want when they want it and a direct-to-consumer experience that attracts, retains, and benefits customers long-term.

Commerce Layer's subscriptions are defined by market, thus market-specific subscription strategies. Commerce Layer lets you handle subscription generation both automatically (the recommended and most common usage) and manually.

Data model

Check the related ER diagram and explore the flowchart that illustrates how the order subscription resource relates to the other API entities.

This guide will walk you through the steps you need to follow to correctly setup the available subscription frequencies and strategies for your markets and trigger automatic subscription generation starting from a source order:

1. Create a subscription model and associate it with a market.
2. Create a source order containing at least one line item that has a frequency and place it.
3. Update the source order by sending a specific trigger attribute to start the order subscription generation.
4. Eventually, edit the automatically generated subscriptions to change the next subscription runs.

Commerce Layer's subscription management can be offered to registered customers only. All the API calls in this guide are supposed to be authenticated with a customer token obtained via the password flow (unless where specified differently). See the Authentication and Applications sections of our documentation if you need more information on how to get an access token for your client or about the different types of credentials you can get.