Subscription Grouping Issues

In Subscribe Pro, each subscription represents a single product. When a customer creates an order with multiple subscription products, multiple subscriptions get created in Subscribe Pro. For recurring orders it is most often desirable for customers to receive orders containing multiple subscriptions, rather than an order for each one. To that end, when possible Subscribe Pro's default functionality attempts to group multiple subscriptions into as few orders as possible.

However, subscriptions will not be grouped into a single order if any one out of several criteria do not match exactly. To view more details about how our system attempts to group subscriptions and which criteria are required to match for grouping to take place, please view the following documentation: Subscription Grouping and Partial Orders.

Here are a few scenarios that may result in subscriptions not being grouped, or else being grouped in multiple sub-groups, even if they seem like they should combine into a single order based on the information in the above linked article:

Subscriptions not grouping as expected while updating them them one-by-one

Subscribe Pro is constantly searching for subscriptions that are eligible for order placement. For each environment this starts at the time configured under System > Configuration > Ordering Settings. As soon as it finds one or more subscriptions that need to be processed, it schedules them in a new batch. Example: You have two subscriptions that are currently in a failed status and you are trying to reactivate them so that they will run today. If you edit each one individually, our system may find the first eligible subscription and schedule it before you have finished editing the second one. In this case, the subscriptions will be sent as separate orders. Instead, if you wish to have them group into one order, we recommend using the Mass Edit Subscriptions feature. This feature can be found on the Manage > Subscriptions page, as well as when editing a customer (at Manage > Customers > Edit) in the subscription list. To use it, select the checkboxes next to the desired subscriptions and click Mass Edit. This will cause all of the subscriptions you are editing to be updated at the same time, so they will be batched together for order processing.

2. Subscriptions not grouping as expected despite all required criteria appearing to match

In the above linked article, several criteria are listed that must match for grouping to happen. Of these, some criteria may have duplicate entries saved in the customer information. In that case, it can be difficult to differentiate between them when editing a subscription. For instance, you may have two address records saved that are identical. However, each of those addresses in our system has a unique ID number that is used to link it to payment profiles (as the billing address) and subscriptions (as the shipping address). Our system considers these as two separate addresses, even if the address data is identical. In order for a subscription to group with another subscription, the same address record must be set on both. The same concept applies to payment profiles, as it is possible for customers to save the same card multiple times.

3. Subscriptions not grouping as expected when a customer reactivates them from their My Product Subscriptions page in Magento.

If you have several subscriptions and reactivate them individually via the My Product Subscriptions page, the same thing can happen as with the first scenario. That is, if you reactivate one subscription individually, by the time you reactivate the second subscription, the first may already have been batched. This is harder to prevent, as it is customer-initiated. However, a way to handle this is to be proactive with subscription failures, reaching out to the customer and letting them know you will handle reactivating the subscription once the issue that caused it to fail is resolved.

If you have read all of the above information and still cannot figure out why your customer's subscriptions did not group as you expected, please reach out to [email protected] so that we can help take a look.