Charging on a specific day of the week or month

You can set up your subscription rules to charge orders on a specific day. For example, you can charge your customers on the 15th of every month or weekly every Wednesday. Customers will always be billed immediately at the time of checkout, but subsequent orders will charge on the day you have set. This guide provides an overview of the functionality and how to set specific charge days.

Before you start

• Checkouts made on the same day as your set charge date will not skip the next interval charge.
• This feature is in Eastern Standard Time (EST). Any orders made by midnight 00:00 ET (UTC -4) of the specific charge day will not skip.

Understand specific charge days

Customers will always be charged when they first sign-up. Their second order will always skip the next billing cycle to prevent customers from being double-charged.

If you would like to turn off the skip cycle feature, reach out to the Recharge support team. Note that even when turning off this feature, the Recharge billing system will not bill a customer twice in a single billing period. If you would like to do this, you can set up a cut-off window.

The table below highlights different schedules depending on when the customer placed their checkout order.

Set a specific charge day in a subscription  

1. In the merchant portal, click Products. 
2. Select the product you would like to edit.
3. Scroll down to Order schedule, set the frequency for how often the customer will be charged and click Save.
   

Use a cut-off window

When an order is placed at checkout, it is considered to be part of the upcoming specified order date. For example, if a customer places an order on October 10th and you bill your recurring customers on the 15th, the October 10th order would be fulfilled alongside the orders that process on October 15th.

Depending on your specified charge day, you may find customers are waiting a while for their next order. You may also want to fulfill an order for a customer, even though your specified charge day for that week or month has passed.

In this scenario, you will want to create a cut-off window. This creates a window of time where a customer can place an order and have it fulfilled within that billing cycle. See Creating a cut-off window.

Update specific charge day for existing customers

For individual customers:

1. In the merchant portal, click Customers and search and select the customer.
2. Click See details next to the Address ID for the subscription. 
3. Select Edit Recurring Properties next to the subscription item.
4. Set the item properties and click Save changes. This will also auto-update the upcoming charge date to reflect this change.
   

For customers in bulk

Reach out to the Recharge support team to help facilitate a bulk update. This type of bulk update will require two separate CSVs, one for the new charge day and one to adjust the pre-existing upcoming charge dates. To learn more, visit Bulk updating for the Recharge Checkout on Shopify or Bulk updating for the Shopify Checkout Integration.