Recurring subtotal line misleading price hurts conversions

@Kellan-Shopify I hope you understand that this is hurting merchants and customers never hover on the tooltips (especially on mobile) :cry::cry::cry:

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@simposk, I do understand this is not ideal in all situations, and I have submitted feedback internally on your behalves regarding this already. We can’t guarantee if the feedback will lead to it being changed in the future, but we do take all of our merchant and partner feedback into great value when determining updates and changes to the platform, and the more feedback we get for topics like this, the more likely it would be changed.

@Kellan-Shopify How are you protecting shopper integrity if the subscription that they will be charged is $60 a month but you guys are telling them it’s $100? I am using random numbers in this situation, but I give my subscribers a big discount but now they think they are being charged a lot more then I would ever charge a subscriber. My entire life has been effected since this change.

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Hi @dlisper,

Just to confirm, the change here is that the “Recurring Subtotal” text itself can no longer be edited.

The fact that the actual recurring subtotal value displayed doesn’t include discounts, is expected behaviour and has always behaved this way. This is communicated to the customer through the fact that it’s a “subtotal” which typically doesn’t include discount values, as seen in the order details in the checkout, and the order summary in the store’s admin. Additionally as I mentioned in a previous post above, if you hover over the “?” tooltip next to the “Recurring Subtotal” text, it does display a message explaining that discounts are not included.

Summary in Checkout:

Order Summary in the Admin:


That said, as I mentioned previously, I have submitted feedback regarding both the removal of the ability to edit the “Recurring Subtotal” text, and the fact that the value doesn’t include discounts.

If you are specifically concerned about the change made with editing the text itself, can I ask for some more context on how you were using this feature, and how it’s affected you exactly, so I can include more context in the feedback to our developers internally, as the more information and context we get for feedback such as this the better we understand the various use cases, and I can potentially help offer a workaround if one is available.

It was a mini doomsday moment the day I received an email saying that Shopify was no longer allowing merchants to edit the recurring subtotals and surrounding text

This should literally be a top priority for your engineers to resolve. Merchants currently have the inability to show the correct prices at checkout. There isn’t much that’d be worse in a store’s funnel than that

I managed to find another semi-good hotfix for most situations, but customers purchasing my bundles are still out of luck and will now be seeing that the recurring prices are ridiculously high

Regarding the tool tip, it’s very unrealistic to expect a customer to reverse engineer that. It’s literally worthless for this specific issue. For example, not a single customer is going to think “There’s a Shopify subscription and bundles app that gives discounts, and the recurring subtotal being displayed is what would be shown if these Shopify apps were giving no discounts.” Customers don’t know anything about a Shopify store’s internals

I hope that a way to solve this issue comes much sooner than this summer or this winter, even if just temporarily while the engineers work on a permanent solution. This is a giant, giant issue, completely decimating the ability for many merchants to flourish from selling subscriptions

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@Kellan-Shopify For the ability to edit the recurring subtotal text and prices, I previously used that feature by putting an empty space so that no text or values would show at all. This would prevent customers from seeing an incorrect price that I couldn’t control so that they wouldn’t see a super high price and get scared from purchasing

This obviously isn’t ideal, but it beats having the wrong price displayed. Customers still saw they were purchasing a subscription, had information on that subscription’s details from the product page, etc, so they still knew what they were purchasing

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Hi @Grayson_Weber,

I appreciate your feedback and further context on how you were editing the recurring subtotal label, I will be passing this to our developers internally as well for feedback.

That said, at this time I can confirm that all the behaviour experienced is currently expected and behaving as designed, and while there’s no plans for this to be changed in the near future, we do take all of our partner and merchant feedback with great value, and the more feedback we get for topics like this, the more likely it would be changed in the future.

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@Kellan-Shopify This has really affected our conversion rates, by almost halving them, barely keeping us break even, and even losing money often. I know you’re able to understand the importance of showing the correct price, and this is a solution that may help. Shopify seems reluctant to allow editing of the recurring subtotal, which is understandable for buyer integrity, and you can’t be expecting all or even most customers to click on the tools tip ? icon to figure out, most would sooner leave, which I have experienced since this change. However, you could in fact add a recurring total underneath it, show the subtotal then the total to allow customers to clearly see their discount applied and what they will be actually charged, rather than only showing recurring subtotal. This is an urgent issue for every single store using any subscription model. I have attached more examples from our store for you to understand how bad this looks from a customer perspective to see a much higher price they will be charged every cycle, which obviously scares off a large amount of conversions.

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@simposk @Info_Solkairo and all the others I can’t tag.

Hi guys, I found a workaround for this for now.

I’m using Kaching Bundles. Instead of using discounts, I recreated the bundle options as variants with adjusted pricing.

Example product: Cream

1. Create bundle variants

  • Buy 1

  • Buy 2 Get 1 FREE

2. Set variant prices without discounts

  • Buy 1 → 39.90

  • Buy 2 Get 1 FREE → 2 × 39.90 = 79.90, divided by 3 units → 26.63 per unit

So the variant price becomes: 26.63

3. Assign variants to bundles in Kaching

After creating the variants, go into the Kaching Bundles app and assign each variant to the corresponding bundle option (so the app displays the correct bundle selection).

4. (Optional but recommended) Add compare-at price

To still show the discount visually on the PDP + cart:

  • Price: 26.63

  • Compare-at: 39.90

This allows Kaching to show the deal without affecting checkout pricing.


Result

Checkout now shows the correct recurring subtotal since Shopify pulls the subscription price directly from the variant instead of applying a discount later. Frontend still shows the savings thanks to compare-at pricing.

Posting here in case it helps someone dealing with the same issue.

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@Kellan-Shopify @simposk Hey Guys, can you please fix the issue, t’s really hurting my conv rate. What is even the point of this thing? can’t it be fixed easily?
Thanks.

Hi @Anshu_S,

As I mentioned above, this is fully expected behaviour at this current time. There will not be any fixes to be made, because this was a conscious decision made by our developers and product managers to keep the checkout behaving in this way.

I understand that this affects your current workflow, and I have submitted very detailed feedback to our developers on how this affects partners and merchants, as discussed in this thread, and while we can’t guarantee that this will change, I can assure you that all our Partner and Merchant feedback are taken into great value when determining future features and updates on the platform.

That said, @pive777 shared a workaround above using a 3rd party app, additionally you may be able to workaround this using Checkout Extensions if you wanted to include a workaround in your own app without requiring any further app installations.

Can you please explain how are these brands who are doing multi six figures/month have this kind of structure for MRR-based products? Nowhere it mentioned that this is the recurring total amount, isn’t this illegal?
Thanks.


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hey @Kellan-Shopify this logic its wrong, the client must be fully aware of the amount to be charged, its a big UX problem if the checkout shows an inflated subtotal when in the backend a discount its guaranteed in the subscription.

Shopify shows the prices with discount applied in the product page and checkout… why arbitrary choose the subscription to NOT show the discounts applied in the subscription. ??? its lack of coherence

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Hi @Anshu_S,

Looking at your screenshots provided, it doesn’t look like the subscription selling plan was added to the line items on the cart. This checkout appears to be for one time purchases, not recurring subscriptions.

If you did add the selling plan id to the cart line items, and this is still occurring, I’d suggest reaching out to our Support Team via the Shopify Help Center with a specific example of a Checkout URL experiencing this, and we can definitely look into this further.

@Kellan-Shopify - is this going to be fixed or not? This is causing massive issues and impacting performance. This is NOT desired behaviour.

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Hi @Syed_Rizvi,

As I mentioned in my previous post, which was marked as solving this thread, that this is fully expected behaviour at this time.

Also as mentioned I have submitted feedback internally regarding this, and while we can’t guarantee when or if this will change, I can assure you our developers and product managers are aware of this feedback and take it into great value when determining future features and platform changes.

well, please check by yourself then.

Hey @Info_Solkairo, have you found any solution to this?

@Kellan-Shopify This issue is still not fixed. As you can see from all of the replies above this HURTS everyones conversion and is an URGENT issue. Can you please at least let us change the reoccured price. This is unacceptable and hurts everyone’s subscription method and URGENT. And having people upgrade there plan just to change this is really unacceptable and unethical.

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This is still a massive issue! The topic has not been solved and it is personally a major problem for my store. Is there any timeline on when this will be changed? @Kellan-Shopify

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