Merchant guide¶
bc-subscriptions adds recurring-subscription management to your BigCommerce store. Once installed, your customers can purchase products on a subscription cadence you configure — monthly, weekly, or another interval — and charges fire automatically at that cadence. Subscribers manage their own subscriptions through a self-service customer portal. You get a merchant dashboard showing MRR, active subscriptions, and exceptions.
This section covers everything you need to set up and run subscriptions: getting installed, designing your plans, managing the subscriber lifecycle, recovering from failed charges, and meeting your data-privacy obligations.
The merchant journey¶
Most merchants move through these steps in order. Each links to the guide for that topic.
| Step | What you'll do | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Install bc-subscriptions from the BC Marketplace and complete the first-run setup checklist | Getting started |
| Subscription plans | Create plans that define cadence, pricing, and trial terms for your products | Subscription plans |
| Managing subscribers | Understand the subscriber lifecycle — skip, swap, pause, resume, and cancel | Managing subscribers |
| Dunning (decline recovery) | Configure how bc-subscriptions retries failed charges and notifies subscribers | Dunning |
| Data privacy & compliance | Review how subscriber data is stored, exported, and erased on request | Data privacy & compliance |
Where to go next¶
If you're starting fresh, begin with Getting started. If you're evaluating whether bc-subscriptions fits your store before installing, the Getting started page covers prerequisites and what the install grants access to.