Problem:
When customer adds 2 units of the product with subscription enabled, the checkout correctly shows the initial total as €9.00, but the “Recurring subtotal” line says “€18.00 every month.”
This is misleading and negatively affects conversion rates, because:
Customers are misled into thinking they’ll be charged €18.00 instead of €9.00 for future orders
The recurring subtotal doesn’t reflect any discounts that are indeed applied to future charges
We’ve received numerous complaints from our merchants saying that this line is confusing and hurting their subscription conversions. Some customers abandon checkout because they’re unsure about the actual recurring cost.
Please update the recurring subtotal logic to clearly reflect the final recurring charge after discounts, to avoid confusion and improve merchant conversion performance.
It looks like the recurring value is including the actual 10% subscription discount, but not the automatic discount.
To help look into this further, we’d need more details on the actual discounts in the store that is being applied here, to see if it is set to use the discount for a one time purchase or for recurring subscription, etc.
I would recommend in this case, to reach out to our Shopify Support Team via the Help Center, while logged into a staff account or partner collaborator account that has access to the shop in question, or app creating the discounts, and we can help look into it further after fully authenticating with your logged in account in the Help Center.
Additionally, we do ask that you please refrain from pinging staff members, forum moderators, or any users that have not been involved in a thread already, as it is actually mentioned in our Community Guidelines.
Hey, this is a global issue which impacts all stores, not a specific store and contacting help center will most likely not help…
The discounts are a combination of simple automatic discount (which applies to both one-time purchases and recurring purchases) and pricing policy from the selling plan.
I do understand this issue is affecting multiple stores, not just one specific store. However if you reach out via the Help Center, we can help look into with specific examples you can provide us where it is occurring, so we can actually look into it further with details from an exact discount and shop resulting in this behaviour.
We would need you to reach out through the Help Center specifically though, as you do need to be logged in to authenticate with the partner account or a store provided as an example, for us to actually be able to look into any specific examples.
I can’t even make edits from the default theme code. And the recurring subtotal doesn’t display the CORRECT amount. Which is, if I have a buy 1 get 1 free offer, then after that the subscription bills at 1x the product each month, shopify will display 2x the product price for 2 products every month. Completely ridiculous.
Upon checking, our developer team is already aware of this issue as it has been raised previously. While this was determined to be a limitation of the recurring payments system, the great news is that our team is already actively working on updating this logic. We expect an update likely by next summer or winter where this will no longer be a limitation.
You are absolutely right about the error, and while we are currently working toward that permanent fix, I have added your specific case to our team to bring even more light to this for our engineers.
@Kellan-Shopify is there anyway to remove this section or change the wording? I’ve contacted everyone possible and no one has a fix. It is causing huge loss in revenue on my subscription stores
Shopify shows misleading recurring pricing in checkout for subscriptions, displaying a higher “recurring subtotal” that does not match what the customer is actually paying. This causes confusion at the final step and directly leads to checkout abandonment.
Merchants have zero control over this messaging or wording.
This is not just legal disclosure, it’s conversion damage. Shopify needs to address how recurring prices are presented in checkout.
Is Shopify aware of the revenue impact this is causing?
I do understand that this behaviour is not ideal, however I can confirm that this is something our developers are aware of and is currently a limitation of the recurring payment system where the recurring total shows the subtotal of future orders before discounts are applied.
As mentioned this is a limitation our developers are aware of and looking into further, however we are not able to provide any estimated timeframes for when this would be resolved.
@simposk and @user289, In the meantime you are able to change the wording of the recurring subtotal label, via the Theme Content Editor in the admin directly, rather than through translation content.
You can change this with the following steps:
In the admin navigate to Online Store > Themes
Click the triple dot button next to your active theme, and select Edit Default Theme Content
In the Theme Content Editor, search “Recurring” and you can edit the wording under the Recurring Subtotal Label field
Here’s an example of what this looks like in the checkout on my test store.
And suddently you just change everything again?
The topic is not solved.
Now you can not edit this part in edit default theme content , you guys took it off.
Please correct this asap.
I can confirm that the customization of this field was removed again yesterday, and I’m no longer able to customize this on my own test store as well.
At this time, customizing the Recurring Total and Subtotal and Subscription and purchase option agreement labels are only available for stores on the Shopify Plus Plan moving forward, this change was made in order to protect our buyer integrity. Additionally any non-Plus merchants with existing customizations on this label have received email notification of these changes in advance.
Regarding the actual reason for wanting to customize this label in the thread, with the discounts not displaying in the recurring subtotal.
I can confirm that this is officially expected behaviour that the recurring subtotal doesn’t include discounts, though I will be submitting some feedback on all of your behalf internally that you would like to see this changed in the future.
Additionally there should be no need to edit the Recurring Subtotal label to communicate this limitation to the customers, as this is actually mentioned in the tool tip on the checkout already.
I will be leaving this thread marked as solved, since both issues discussed here has been confirmed as expected behaviour at this time.
