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Managing subscribers

Day-to-day subscription management happens across two surfaces: the merchant dashboard (business health at a glance) and the subscription detail page (admin overrides and CS tools). Subscribers manage their own subscriptions from the storefront portal; this guide covers what you see and do in the admin, and what subscribers can do on their own.

Prerequisites

  • bc-subscriptions installed with at least one active subscription
  • Admin user role with Dashboard view permission (default for all admin roles)

The dashboard

Open bc-subscriptions from your BC store admin. The dashboard is the default landing page.

KPIs

The top row shows three headline KPIs, each with a sparkline of its recent trend. Click a tile to drill into the matching records:

KPI What it measures Clicking drills to
Monthly recurring revenue Monthly-equivalent charge total across active subscriptions Active subscriptions, sorted by MRR
Churn rate (this month) Cancellations this month against the active base Subscriptions cancelled in the last 30 days
Failed charges (last 7 days) Renewal charges that failed to capture in the last 7 days The exception queue, filtered to failed charges

Below the KPIs, a renewal-horizon panel summarises upcoming renewals and the revenue they represent.

Finding a subscription

Click Subscriptions in the left nav. The list is paginated and shows: customer, plan, status, MRR, next charge date, and cycles completed. Apply filters — by status, plan, customer, or date range — to narrow results. The filtered URL is shareable.

Click any row to open the subscription detail page, which shows full state, charge history, payment method health, addresses, and the event timeline.

Subscriber self-service (storefront portal)

These lifecycle actions are subscriber self-service — customers take them from the Manage subscription area of the storefront portal, not the admin. Merchants do not replicate pause / resume / skip / swap / reschedule / change-cadence / reactivate from the admin; the admin's own action set is narrower and covered under Admin actions below. (Cancel is the exception — a merchant can cancel on a subscriber's behalf.)

Pause

Moves the subscription to paused status. No charges occur until the subscription resumes. Subscribers can choose a specific resume date or pause indefinitely.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Resume

Re-activates a paused subscription. If a resume date was set, the system resumes automatically on that date. Manual resume is available before that date if needed.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Skip next charge

Marks the upcoming charge as abandoned (reason: skipped) and advances next_charge_at by one interval. Subscribers have up to 24 hours before the originally scheduled charge date to undo a skip ("Unskip").

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Swap product or variant

Changes the product or variant on the subscription from the next cycle forward. The subscriber sees a price preview before confirming. The swap is only available if the plan offers eligible alternates.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Reschedule next charge

Moves next_charge_at to a subscriber-chosen date (up to the plan's allowed window, e.g., +90 days). All future charges shift accordingly.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Change cadence / interval

Changes the billing interval (for example, monthly to every two months). The new interval applies from the next cycle onward and next_charge_at is recomputed.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Cancel

Ends the subscription. The cancel flow first captures a reason, then may offer an intervention (pause, discount, interval change) before presenting the final confirmation. If the subscriber declines all interventions and confirms, status moves to cancelled and all scheduled future charges are removed.

Cancelled subscriptions can be reactivated within 90 days (see Reactivate below). After 90 days, the subscriber must start a new subscription.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal; a merchant can cancel on the subscriber's behalf from the admin (see Admin actions).

Reactivate

Returns a cancelled subscription (cancelled less than 90 days ago) to active status with a fresh next_charge_at set to now + one interval. If the original product or plan is no longer active, the subscriber is prompted to pick an alternate.

Who can initiate: subscriber via portal.

Admin actions on a subscription

The subscription detail page gives merchants and support staff a focused set of overrides — deliberately narrower than subscriber self-service. Two groups render on the page:

Admin overrides

  • Force retry last failed charge — re-attempts the most recent failed renewal charge immediately.
  • Cancel on behalf — cancels the subscription for the customer, with an audit note.
  • Force cancel — cancels immediately without the intervention flow, for support escalations.

You can also retry an individual charge from the charge-history table.

CS override tools

  • Force charge now — enqueues an immediate charge outside the normal schedule; requires confirmation and records an audit note.
  • Force refund — refunds a charge through the processor with the amount and reason you specify.
  • View as subscriber — opens a read-only impersonation session showing the storefront portal exactly as the subscriber sees it. All actions in the session are logged with your operator ID; portal mutation controls are disabled.

To create a subscription for a customer directly — phone orders, recovered carts, comped accounts — use the global + New subscription wizard; manually created subscriptions behave identically to storefront-created ones.

The exception queue

The exception queue surfaces subscriptions that automation tried to process and could not resolve on its own. Each item is open until you act on it, then resolved.

What lands in the queue

Exception type Cause
payment_failed A renewal charge failed — for example after dunning retries are exhausted
oos_renewal_blocked A product or variant was out of stock at renewal time
shipping_quote_failed A shipping quote couldn't be obtained for the renewal order
chargeback A chargeback / dispute was filed against a subscription charge (carries the processor dispute reference and evidence-due date)

Resolving an exception

From the exception queue (open it from the Dashboard or the Exceptions nav entry), each item can be:

  • Marked resolved — with a note; the item leaves the queue and the resolution is logged.
  • Refunded — with a reason, for charge-related items.
  • Escalated — routed for follow-up when it needs more than a one-step resolution.

Click the subscriber link on any item to open the subscription detail page for deeper action.

Customer lookup from BC admin

When viewing a customer in the BigCommerce admin, a Subscriptions panel (a bc-subscriptions App Extension, registered on the customer context) lists that customer's subscriptions with deep-links into the bc-subscriptions admin. A matching panel is registered on the product context.

The manual-create, impersonation, and force-charge / force-refund tools live on the subscription detail page — see Admin actions above.