Background
This Shopify store offers organic food subscriptions with two plans: one for personal use and one for gifting.
The challenge? In gift subscriptions, the payer and recipient are different for every shipment, each requiring a separate address.
Shopify’s native subscription feature wasn’t built for this. The team struggled with:
- Manual address switching each month
- Difficulty tracking who pays versus who receives
- No unified system for “what gets sent, to whom, and when”
Problem
They needed an automated way to handle:
- Billing vs. shipping separation
- Monthly recipient changes
- Centralized tracking of frequency, payment, and recipient details
All without overwhelming staff with manual updates.
Implementation
The solution combined:
- A Shopify subscription app with Flow support
- Webhook triggers on each subscription renewal
- A gift tag to automatically route orders to the appropriate recipient
- Reminder emails to recipients before shipping, managed by Flow
- A “Skip This Month” button in user profiles that calls an API to adjust delivery schedules
By leveraging Shopify Flow, webhooks, and minimal API integrations, they built a system that logically handled the billing–shipping split.
Outcome
- Zero shipping mistakes or missed renewals
- Buyers can manage gift recipients directly from their account dashboard
- The operations team drastically reduced manual work
- Even with the complexity of monthly gift shipments, the system ran smoothly and scaled easily
Reusability & Insights
Out-of-the-box Shopify features rarely handle split billing and shipping elegantly.
But by combining Shopify Flow, webhooks, and a subscription app, you can create a logic layer that fits real business needs.
In scenarios where “who pays” is different from “who receives,” the key is structure, not more staff.
Final Thought
Subscriptions should be effortless—even if they involve multiple addresses or skipping months.
It’s not about hiring more people; it’s about designing a system that anticipates real-world scenarios.
Start by asking: Which parts of this process are we still doing by hand, and how can we safely automate them?
The right combination of Flow, apps, and a bit of custom logic can make gifting subscriptions painless.
