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Glossary

Subscription Migration

Also known as: Subscriber migration, Switching subscription apps

Subscription migration is the process of moving existing subscribers, their plans, and their next billing dates from one subscription app to another without cancelling their subscriptions or asking them to re-enter payment details.

Migration is the reason merchants stay on apps they have outgrown: the switch feels riskier than the overcharge. The fear is specific and reasonable — a botched move can double-charge subscribers, skip a billing cycle, reset delivery dates, or force customers to re-subscribe, and every one of those is visible to the customer.

What makes it manageable is that on Shopify the payment method is not the merchant's to move. Cards are vaulted by Shopify against the Subscription Contract, so a migration between apps built on Subscription Contracts is a transfer of plan and schedule data rather than of payment credentials. The work is in the mapping: matching products and variants, preserving cadence, and landing each subscriber's next charge on the date they already expect. Run it on a small cohort first, and reconcile the next billing dates before moving the rest.

Curobi includes CSV migration from Recharge, Appstle, Loop, Bold, and Seal on the Pro plan at no extra cost, and existing subscriptions continue without interruption.

Related terms

  • Subscription Contract — A Subscription Contract is Shopify's native record of a recurring agreement between a store and a customer — it stores what is being sold, how often it renews, the price, and the vaulted payment method, and Shopify uses it to create each recurring charge.
  • Selling Plan — A selling plan is Shopify's definition of how a product can be purchased on a recurring basis — the frequency, any subscription discount, and billing terms — and a selling plan group bundles related plans and attaches them to specific products, variants, or collections.
  • Prepaid Subscription — A prepaid subscription is a recurring plan where the customer pays upfront for a fixed number of deliveries — such as a 3-month or 6-month term billed in one charge — instead of being billed each cycle as products ship.
  • Churn — Churn is the rate at which subscribers cancel or lapse over a given period — the share of recurring customers a business loses — and it is the single most important number in a subscription business because retained revenue compounds while churned revenue must be re-acquired.

← All subscription commerce terms

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