Discontinuing subscription products

Sometimes, you may need to discontinue a product from your store. If you are discontinuing subscription products, you must perform additional steps before deleting the product or hiding the product in your ecommerce platform. 

This guide provides instructions on how to discontinue a subscription product and how to remove a product from existing subscriptions.

Before you start

• If you would like existing customers to remain subscribed to the product, do not delete the product from your ecommerce platform. You must make the product unavailable on the storefront in your ecommerce platform instead. See Shopify's instructions for adding and updating products, or BigCommerce's instructions for setting product visibility.
• Deleting a product directly from your storefront can cause a variant not found error. To resolve this error, the deleted product will need to be swapped with an active product. Refer to Troubleshooting variant not found errors for more information. 
• To understand all available bulk update opportunities, refer to our course Updating subscriptions at scale.
• Discontinued products used as the incentive in a Surprise and Delight flow or Rewards strategies are not automatically removed from existing subscriber’s orders. You can manually remove gifts or remove them in bulk.

Discontinue products for new subscribers

Product Subscription Plans

To prevent new customers from purchasing a subscription product, remove the Product Subscription Plan.

1. In the merchant portal, click Products, then select Products from the dropdown.
2. Locate the product you want to discontinue and select it.
3. Click the three vertical dots menu next to the subscription plan and select Deactivate plan. Repeat this step for each plan.

Variant Level Plans

To stop offering subscriptions for a specific product variant, remove the variant-level subscription plan from the product. This prevents new subscription purchases for that variant while allowing existing subscriptions to continue processing as usual.

1. In the merchant portal, click Products, then select Products from the dropdown.
2. Locate the product you want to discontinue and select it.
3. Click Manage variant plans.
4. Deselect the plans for each variant.
5. Click Save changes.

One-time products

You can disable the one-time product option to prevent new customers from purchasing one-time products in Recharge.

1. In the merchant portal, click Products, then select Products from the dropdown.
2. Locate the product you want to discontinue and select it.
3. Click the three vertical dots menu next to the One-time plan and select Delete plan. 

Legacy product rules

1. From the merchant portal click Products.
2. Locate the product you want to discontinue and select Actions.
3. Click Remove from Recharge.

Discontinue products for existing subscribers

If you are discontinuing products for only a few customers, manually remove or swap the product from the customer's account or discontinue products in bulk. 

You can use the Multi-select or Import tool to discontinue the subscription:

• To swap one product for another, follow Product Swap in bulk.
• To cancel the subscriptions and remove them from the customer profiles entirely, follow Delete subscriptions in bulk.
• To cancel the subscriptions but maintain them on the customer profile as inactive for possible reactivation in the future, follow Cancel subscriptions in bulk.

Considerations

Consider the following when discontinuing a product: