Once a customer subscribes, the app handles every renewal for you — charging the card and creating the order on schedule, with no action needed on your part. Knowing when those charges happen helps you set expectations and answer customer questions.

The first charge happens at checkout, just like any order. If the option has an intro price for the first orders, that’s the price the customer pays now. This first order also creates the ongoing subscription.

After that, each renewal is charged automatically on the subscription’s schedule. The customer is charged, the order is created, and you fulfill it like a normal order. The price follows the option’s settings — your standing discount, or the intro price if they’re still within the intro period.

Each subscription tracks its next order date, based on the frequency the customer chose. After every successful charge, the date advances to the next cycle. Customers can see their next order date in their account, and you can see it on the subscription in your admin.

If you’ve turned on fulfillment lead time for an option, the order is created a few days before its scheduled date so it has time to ship and arrive on cadence. This also means the charge lands a few days earlier. With lead time off (the default), billing happens exactly on the scheduled date.

If a renewal charge doesn’t go through, the app retries it automatically and asks the customer to update their card. See “Failed payments and retries” for what happens next.