What is a subscription contract?

A subscription contract is Shopify's term for one customer's ongoing subscription: the lines and quantities they receive, the prices they pay, the delivery and billing schedule, and the vaulted payment method the renewals are charged against. Every recurring order a subscriber gets is generated from their contract.

#Contract vs. selling plan

A selling plan is the offer; the contract is the agreement one shopper entered into on that offer. A store has a handful of selling plans and as many contracts as it has subscribers.

#How WallaB.AI works with contracts

WallaB keeps its own record of each contract, scoped to the shop it belongs to, and applies changes back to Shopify through its gateway. A portal change a shopper makes — a product swap, a price-affecting edit, a new payment method — is written by opening a contract draft, updating it, and committing the draft; if any step returns an error the whole edit aborts and nothing is written locally either, so WallaB's record and Shopify's contract cannot drift apart.

Renewals are charged against the contract as billing attempts, each carrying a unique idempotency key so a retried job can never charge a cycle twice.

#What a shopper can change

Skips, pauses, resumes, product swaps, cadence changes, and address edits all act on the contract behind the scenes — see Pause vs. skip vs. swap and Your subscription portal.