Offer free shipping on recurring orders through Workflows
Workflows by Recharge is a powerful tool that automatically applies changes to subscription rules and parameters after checkout or between recurring orders. One of the more popular use cases for the Workflows feature is to offer free shipping on recurring orders to your customers.
This guide explains how to configure a free shipping workflow.
Before you start
- Legacy Workflows that adjust product or shipping prices are not multi-currency compatible. Price overrides are adjusted regardless of the customer’s currency.
- For example, if you have a workflow set to change a price to 10.00, the price change will be treated as 10 pesos, 10 USD, 10 EURs, etc.
- Workflows that leverage the following new workflow templates will only run on addresses that use stores’ default currency and will not run on multi-currency addresses.
- Workflows should not be used with prepaid subscriptions.
Step 1 - Setup your workflow
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 in the future.
Step 2 - Configure the workflow trigger
Begin your workflow by selecting the necessary trigger. The trigger is used to determine which charge the workflow properties should apply to. You can either set your workflow to trigger after a customer's checkout order is processed, or a specific recurring order has been processed.
Since we want to offer free shipping on the customer's first recurring order onwards, we can keep the trigger as a checkout order.
Step 3 - Set the workflow conditions
The workflow Conditions need to be set next. 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.
For this example, we recommend using Product title as the condition.
Once you’ve determined a common title, use the "contains" option to ensure that the workflow applies to all titles using that word. Save your conditions to move on to the next step.
Step 4 - Configure the search and actions
The Search option is used to identify which objects in the order are updated by the workflow. Typically, the search option you set matches the condition set in Step 4.
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. To setup a free shipping workflow use the following actions:
-
shipping_rate_price
– This is how much you will charge for shipping on the recurring subscriptions. In this example, it is set to 0 for free shipping. -
shipping_rate_title
– This will be the title of your shipping rate. In this example, it is titled Free. -
shipping_rate_code
– This is used internally and not seen by the customer. It can normally be set to the same text as yourshipping_rate_title
.
Step 5 - Enable your 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.
Step 6 - Test your workflow
Perform a test transaction to confirm the workflow is working as expected.
- Running a test transaction on the Recharge Checkout for BigCommerce or Shopify
- Running a test transaction on the Shopify Checkout Integration
After you’ve placed your test order, head back to the merchant portal, 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.