We’re excited to introduce minimum commitments for order-based project types. This update allows you to capture longer-term commitments from customers, similar to rental subscriptions, while still providing full flexibility in delivery timing of committed orders for your customers.
Minimum ordering commitments help you immediately reduce churn after the first order, avoid subscription order discount abuse, and strengthen customer retention.
This feature is linked to a certain plan in your Firmhouse project. You can find your plans under the Plans tab on your portal. Basically, a plan sets the agreement terms with your customer, including how often they get their products and any discounts for that plan.
If you want to give your customers choices like how often they get shipments, you have to make a separate plan for each choice.
How minimum commitments work
Minimum commitments are the third term you can now establish for your plans.
This is how they work:
Once you set a minimum commitment for a specific plan, all new subscriptions will follow those terms automatically.
Your customers can still add products on their subscription management portal after the original signup. These products do not get automatically locked in the commitments - meaning your customers can add or remove products freely, as long as they're not part of the commitment.
Commitments become active on subscription activation and get updated when a relevant change is made (a shipment date is changed, orders are paused or skipped).
Our recommendation is that you set your minimum commitments using multiples of that plan frequency. For example: if you have a monthly plan and you want to lock in your customers for two orders, you set your minimum commitment period as one month. That will cover the first order, which is immediate, and the second order one month later. If you want to lock in your customers for three orders, then you set your minimum commitment period as two months: the immediate first order, a second order after a month and the third order at the end of the second month.
As a merchant, you can change agreements with a customer if necessary. You can take out products, cancel orders before the agreed time, change the dates of commitments, and set a new date for the next shipment.
New project access role: Support Agent
We created a new role for your team members: Support agent. This limits you support team members to only operational tasks inside a project. They don't have access to any customer data, and can't change any of the settings of a project, change pricing, or create discounts.
This role can only see subscriptions, invoices and orders, but no other settings:
Order rescheduling for pre-paid subscriptions
Adjust the dates of orders for customers who are on a pre-paid subscription plan. As a merchant you can now reschedule future shipments for your customers, without having to file a ticket with our team to get it done for you.
Workflow: Swap products after first order on checkout
Offering starter kits can be a hassle for many merchants, with lots of manual work to adjust products and prices for new customers. With our new Checkout Product Swap workflow, you can say goodbye to all of that.
Create as many links between different products as you like and easily change products for new subscriptions after the first order. Your customers get the initial product in their first order (like a starter kit with a unique flavor) and then automatically receive a different product in all future orders (the regular flavor they'll get while subscribed).
After changing the products, the subscription prices are automatically updated to match the new products without needing to do anything.
The process is easy: set up your product links, use an email domain filter to test without involving your customers, and do a test signup with your own domain to check how it works. When you're satisfied with the setup, just turn off the email filter to start using this process for all new signups.
New configurations for plan discounts with Shopify
We recently added two new configuration options for Shopify plan discounts:
Type or purchase eligibility
Fixed amount discount for Shopify selling plans
With these additions we’re expanding further how you can reward loyal subscribers.
Configure type or purchase eligibility
You can now decide on which type of purchase the discount should apply. This is great to exclude specific products from discounts in your offering.
Available discount options:
All (default)
One time purchases only
Recurring only
Before we had this configuration, the discount would apply to all types of purchases, which is currently still the default behavior.
Fixed amount discount available for Shopify selling plans
You can now choose between a percentage discount or a fixed amount discount on your plan. Previously in our new Shopify integration we only supported % based discounts.
For example, you can now offer your customers:
Give your customers a 10% discount, or
Give your customers a €10 euro discount
These new discounts for our Shopify integration help you easily change prices for your customers.
Bugs & improvements
Easier refunds: Firmhouse users now see when a refund has to be made from the Shopify interface for first orders and specific payment methods.
Shopify requires at least one product in the subscription and prevents removing the last product. We're disabling the button to clarify why the action can't be performed.
Connecting your Shopify app to a Firmhouse project is now simpler, with relevant settings enabled by default to ease the transition.
A fix was implemented to address a problem in plan validation, enhancing the reliability of managing Shopify plan groups by preventing plans within the same group from having duplicate names, thus eliminating failures caused by such duplicates.
When a customer uses a billing address from a country not previously selected in your Firmhouse project, it will now be automatically enabled if they sign up via Shopify.
To reduce unnecessary alerts, only notifications requiring action will be recorded going forward, while automatic issues, like false payment failure alerts, will be silently resolved.
Klaviyo has improved error messaging to alert users if they mistakenly enter a private key instead of a public one, guiding them to use the correct key.
The Forecast report now features products from scheduled orders, including pre-paid plans, offering a complete overview of products set for shipment on designated dates, facilitating inventory preparation.
Added new order_by and reverse arguments to the ordersV2 field in the getSubscription query to improve sorting options.
