ReCharge Workflows is a great way to automate some of your processes and free up your time to grow your customer base.
Many merchants use workflows to allow their customers to try their product before they subscribe to it. Offering a free trial is a great way to convey to customers how confident you are in your product since you know that they’ll want to subscribe after the trial.
With a 14-day free trial, customers receive their first subscription product for free and are then charged the next subscription charge 14 days later. After that, the customer is subscribed to the product and is charged based on the frequency you decide.
In this tutorial, we’ll be setting up a 14-day free trial workflow together as we walk through the step-by-step process.
Step 1 - Create the product in Shopify
Before you can begin building the workflow in ReCharge, you need to create the product in Shopify.
There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a free trial product in Shopify. For the product name, we typically recommend setting it to include the word free, or free trial i.e. Free Trial product. This will make it easier to identify the product when creating the workflow.
When setting the product price, you will need to think of what type of subscription you plan on offering for this product.
For this example, we will be offering the product as subscription-only, so we can set the original product price to $0.00.
That way, when the customer checks out, their first order would cost $0.00. The workflow will then adjust the subscription so customers pay for all recurring charges.
If you are offering a product as both an one-time product and a subscription, you will want to adjust the price on the auto-renew version of the product. That way, if a customer checks out with the one time purchase version of the product, they will be charged the full price. If they purchase the product as a subscription then they would be charged $0.00 at the checkout.
If you are planning on offering the product as both an OTP and a subscription product, you will need to come back to the Shopify product page once you have added this product to a ruleset to adjust the auto-renew product pricing.
Step 2 - Add the product to a ruleset in ReCharge
Once the product is created in Shopify, it’s time to add it to a ruleset in ReCharge. This will allow you to offer the product as a subscription to your customers. You’ll want to set the ruleset up to reflect the subscription properties that the product should follow once the free trial is over.
For our example ruleset, we’ll set the subscription to ship and charge customers every 30 days.
Step 3 - Create the workflow
Now that the product is set up in Shopify and in a ruleset in ReCharge, we can create the free trial workflow.
Accessing the ReCharge Workflows Tool
To begin, select Integrations from the ReCharge dashboard.
If you have not created a workflow before, you will need to find the ReCharge Workflow integration from the All integrations tab. Select Get, which will enable the integration in your store.
Select the ReCharge Workflows integration through the Enabled integrations tab to begin.
Once on the Workflows page, select Create new workflow to begin the process of building your workflow.
Set a name and description for your workflow to make it easier to reference down the road.
Press Next to begin building your workflow.
Understanding the workflow trigger
The Workflow Tool begins by listing the trigger that is used to determine which charge the workflow properties should apply to. Currently, you have the option on your end to build workflows that are triggered when customers go through the checkout. This means that when an order goes through the checkout with a product that meets the workflow properties, the workflow will be initiated, and the actions for that workflow will apply to all of the customer’s remaining recurring orders.
Setting the workflow conditions
The first thing you will need to do to create your workflow is to set the Conditions. The Conditions are what need to be met for the properties of the workflow to apply. Our system checks each checkout order processed against the specified conditions to determine if a workflow should be applied or not. Only orders that meet the defined conditions will have the workflow actions applied.
We typically recommend using Product title as the condition since it’s easy to remember and identify. The ReCharge Workflow Tool is case sensitive, so make sure that whatever phrasing you’re using here matches the product exactly.
In our example, we’ll set the Product title to contain the words Free Trial so that it applies to the free trial product we created earlier.
The phrase auto-renew is added to the product title for hidden, duplicate products, and the auto-renew product is used to create the checkout order.
If we set the Product title using equal to Free Trial, the workflow would skip any orders that contain auto-renew in the title. That’s why we used the option contains instead so that the workflow searches for all orders that contain products with the phrase Free Trial, even if there are additional words in the product title.
Configuring search and actions
The Search option is used to identify which objects in the order are updated by the workflow. You’ll want to search for the free trial product that should be updated on the recurring order.
In this example, we’ll set the search parameters to apply the workflow to all orders for products that contain Free Trial. You’ll notice that this mirrors the conditions we previously set. This is quite common when creating a workflow, as the conditions are also often what the workflow should apply to.
Next, Actions are used to update various aspects of the order. These actions will only apply to products that meet the search criteria you just set up.
For a 14-day free trial workflow, we will need to use at least 2 actions: price and charge delay.
The Price action is used to update the product price from $0.00 to the full price on the customer’s second order. This will set the price from $0.00 to the full product price on the customer’s second order.
In our example, we’ll set this to 50.
The Charge delay action will set the number of days until the customer should be charged again. We will set this to 14 for our example.
With this set, customers will be able to try the product for free for 14 days, and then will be charged for their next recurring order after 14 days. Once they’ve been charged for that order, the rest of their subscriptions will be charged and shipped every 30 days, as per the ruleset we configured earlier.
You don’t need to include the charge delay action if you would like to offer a free trial and wait for the next recurring order to be created within the specified ruleset frequency. For example, if we left out the charge delay action in this workflow, our customers would receive their first $50.00 charge 30 days after they checked out.
Alternatively, you could offer a 7-day or 21-day free trial by specifying a different charge delay number.
You will also likely want to include the action Product title to update the product title from Free Trial to the product’s actual name.
Once everything is set up correctly, press Save searches and actions to create your workflow.
Step 4 - Enable the workflow
After you’ve finished setting up your workflow you will need to head back into the Workflows Integration main page to turn the workflow on.
Change the status of your workflow to enabled by moving the slider into the green position underneath the Status column.
Once enabled, customers who check out with the specified products will have the Free trial workflow applied to update their future orders.
Step 5 - Test your workflow
You can follow our instructions on running a test transaction to confirm that the workflow is working correctly.
After you’ve placed your test order, head back to the ReCharge dashboard, and open up your test customer profile. Confirm the success of the workflow by checking the History section. You should see the name of the workflow displayed, as well as the actions the workflow performed.
Offer free shipping on the recurring subscription
After a free trial is complete, you may want to offer free shipping for recurring orders. For more information, visit Free shipping after a free trial.