For your active subscribers Withfriends generates two kinds of orders independently, Membership orders and Shipment orders.

Here's an example customer's order history

Membership orders

Memberships are digital products. Membership orders represent the payments by your members (always monthly or annual), and they represent the agreement that your business has with your members for their member benefits.

These orders occur the moment the member joins, and then every month or year afterwards at 9am UTC exactly.

Because they're digital, you don't have to take any action on these orders. In most cases, we'll fulfill them automatically, as pictured above.

In some cases, a member will add a membership through our add-to-cart upsell. You'll see a mixed order for the customer with a membership line item as well as one of your one-time products. We don't mark these as fulfilled. For these mixed orders, mark the order as fulfilled when you ship the one-time product.

Shipment orders

Shipment orders are physical subscription boxes that you send to your members. They are $0.00, as pictured above, unless you've unchecked "shipping included" in the Withfriends app.

Shipment orders occur at any schedule you design in the Withfriends app: weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and more.

They're tagged "Withfriends", as pictured. We'll also tag the first shipment order for each membership with "First Shipment", so you can include a welcome note if you'd like.

Every day that we generate shipment orders, we send you a summary that morning with instructions. For shipment orders, fulfill them like you would any physical product order.

Why?

The separation of Subscription orders from Membership orders results in members being retained longer. It allows members to make payments at the familiar monthly or annual intervals that they know from their experience with Netflix or Amazon Prime. Meanwhile, it gives you the ability to design the kind of subscription box schedule that perfectly fits your products and audience.