Setting up the Subscriptions extension

Updated Oct 14, 2026 Extensions

The Subscriptions extension adds recurring billing to TitanCart: subscription products, membership plans, free trials, signup fees and automatic renewals. This guide takes about fifteen minutes.

Two things to know before you start:

Subscriptions is included with TitanCart Pro. There is no separate license key to buy or enter.
Renewals need a gateway that can save a payment method. Stripe, PayPal, Square and Authorize.Net all can. See step 2.

1. Turn subscriptions on

Subscriptions ships with TitanCart Pro, so your Pro subscription is the credential. Under TitanCart → Extensions → Installed Extensions it appears marked Included in Pro, with no key field. If it is not installed yet, you can install it from Extensions → Extensions Marketplace without leaving your admin.

Make sure the TitanCart Subscriptions plugin is installed and active.
Go to TitanCart → Growth → Subscriptions and open the Settings tab.
In the General card, switch Enable Subscriptions on and click Save Settings.

Note: this step is not optional. The extension ships with the master switch off, and subscription plans do nothing on the storefront until it is on. Every other setting can be configured first and the master switch flipped last.

2. Check your payment gateway can renew

An automatic renewal is a charge made later, with nobody at the keyboard, so the gateway has to be able to save a reusable payment method at checkout. Four gateways can:

Stripe
PayPal
Square
Authorize.Net

Venmo, cash on delivery, check and other offline methods cannot. TitanCart handles this for you rather than letting a shopper find out at the end: on a cart containing a subscription, the methods that cannot renew are removed from the checkout payment picker and an amber notice explains which ones were withheld and why. If a store has no gateway at all that can renew, the notice says so instead of showing an empty picker.

Note for PayPal specifically: saved payment methods must be enabled on the PayPal app whose credentials you entered (in PayPal’s developer dashboard this is the “Save payment methods” / Vault feature). Without it PayPal will take the first payment happily and then have nothing to charge at the first renewal.

3. Configure how subscriptions behave

The Settings tab is a set of cards. What each one controls:

General — the master switch, whether subscriptions and one-time products may share a cart (Allow Mixed Cart), whether a $0 first order can complete without a payment method (Zero Initial Checkout, for free trials), and custom text for the subscribe and place-order buttons.
Preorder / Delayed Start — take nothing today and start billing on a fixed date. See step 7.
Customer Permissions — what subscribers may do for themselves: pause (and how many pauses per billing period), cancel, switch plans, update their payment method.
Renewals — automatic renewal, manual renewal, and whether customers may renew early.
Failed Payment Retry — whether to retry, how many attempts, the gaps between them in days (for example 1,3,7), and the grace period before a past-due subscription is cancelled.
Notifications — how many days before a renewal to email the customer, how many days before a subscription ends to warn them, plus payment-failed and status-change emails, plus a Manual Renewal Alert that emails the store (not the customer) when a subscription comes due with no saved payment method.
Plan Switching — how unused time on the old plan is credited when a customer switches: daily proration, no proration, or full period credit.

Note: the Expiration Warning needs Subscriptions 1.0.5 or newer — on earlier versions the field is there but no email is sent. From 1.0.5 it warns about a subscription that is genuinely ending: one carrying a fixed end date, or one on the last cycle a plan with a renewal limit allows. A cancellation or a failed payment is not an expiry and has its own email.

4. Create a subscription plan on a product

A plan holds the billing terms. One product can carry several — Monthly and Annual, say — and the shopper picks.

Open the product under Products. If you are making a new one, save it first — the Subscription tab only appears on a product that already exists.
Open the Subscription tab and click + Create Plan.
Fill in the plan:
- Plan Name and Price — both required.
- Billing Period and Billing Interval — the unit (day, week, month, year) and how many of them per cycle. Interval 3 with period Month bills quarterly.
- Signup Fee — an optional one-time charge on the first payment.
- Trial Days — an optional free period before the first charge.
- Max Renewals — 0 runs indefinitely; any other number ends the subscription after that many cycles.
- Site Limit — for software or license-style subscriptions, how many activations the plan allows. 0 is unlimited.
- Status — Active to offer it on the storefront, Disabled to hide it.
- Customer Group — optional. A subscriber is added to this group while their subscription is live, which is how member pricing and member-only access are driven.
Click Create Plan. It appears in the list on the tab and on the storefront product page straight away.

The same tab lets you Link existing plan — useful when several products share one set of terms — and Unlink a plan (it survives as a standalone plan) or Delete it outright.

Note: if a product should only be sold as a subscription, tick Subscriptions only on the product’s General tab. That removes the One-Time Purchase option from the storefront so the shopper must pick a plan.

5. Standalone plans and memberships

A plan does not have to belong to a product. A standalone plan — one with no product attached — suits a membership or a service, and you can manage every plan in one place on the Plans tab under Growth → Subscriptions.

Access control runs through customer groups. Give the plan a Customer Group and TitanCart adds the subscriber to it while the subscription is active, on hold or past due, and removes them when it is cancelled or expires — unless they hold another live subscription that grants the same group. Point your member pricing, group-restricted categories and group-only promotions at that group and access follows the subscription automatically.

Note: TitanCart does not assign WordPress roles from a subscription. If you need to gate WordPress pages or a third-party membership plugin by role, that mapping has to come from elsewhere — subscription access inside TitanCart is customer-group based.

6. What the customer experiences

A subscription product shows a Subscription Plans selector under the price: one pill per active plan, with the billing terms, any trial, and any signup fee. Unless the product is subscriptions-only, a One-Time Purchase pill sits alongside them.
Checking out starts the subscription and applies the trial or signup fee to the first payment.
Afterwards the subscriber manages everything under My Account → My Subscriptions: depending on your Customer Permissions, they can pause, resume, cancel, switch plan or update their payment method.

7. Preorder and delayed start

Preorder mode lets you sell a subscription now and start billing on a date you choose — a launch day, the start of a season, the opening of a course.

In the Preorder / Delayed Start card, turn Preorder Mode on and set a Launch / First-Charge Date. While it is on, a new subscription takes $0 today, the card is securely saved for later, and the first real charge lands on the launch date. The product page, cart, checkout and order confirmation all say so, so nobody is surprised by a charge later.

Moving the launch date re-schedules every preorder subscription that has not yet taken its first charge.
Once the date passes, preorder mode stands down by itself and new signups bill normally — you do not have to remember to switch it off.
Because nothing is charged at signup, the card is saved with a card-setup request rather than a payment. Use Stripe for preorder subscriptions.
Leaving the launch date blank switches the whole feature off, whatever the toggle says.

8. Manage subscriptions as an admin

Growth → Subscriptions has four tabs:

Subscriptions — every subscription, filterable by status. Open one to pause, resume or cancel it and to read its full event history.
Plans — every plan on the store, product-linked and standalone alike.
Analytics — monthly and annual recurring revenue, active subscriber count, churn rate, renewals due in the next seven days, how many are past due, the status split, revenue by plan, and new versus cancelled over the last thirty days.
Settings — the cards from step 3.

A subscription is in one of six states: Pending (created, first payment not settled), Active, On Hold (paused), Past Due (a renewal failed and retries are running), Cancelled, or Expired (it reached its maximum number of renewals). A subscription in a trial or a preorder window is Active with a trial end date, not a separate state.

9. How renewals, retries and dunning work

With auto-renewal on, TitanCart charges the saved payment method on schedule and creates a renewal order, and the subscriber gets a reminder email a few days beforehand.

If a renewal is declined, the subscription moves to Past Due, the customer gets a payment-failed email, and the retry rules from step 3 take over: TitanCart retries on your configured intervals for as long as the grace period lasts. If a retry succeeds the subscription returns to Active. If nothing succeeds before the grace period runs out, it is cancelled. Subscribers also get emails for activation, renewal, pause, resume and cancellation.

All of this runs on WordPress’s scheduler: renewals are checked hourly, retries twice a day, expirations and renewal reminders once a day. On a quiet site WP-Cron only fires when someone visits, so a store with little traffic should run a real server cron job instead — otherwise renewals happen late.

Troubleshooting

The Enable Subscriptions toggle will not switch on — the store is not entitled to Pro. Subscriptions is included with TitanCart Pro and needs no key of its own; check your core subscription under TitanCart → Extensions → Installed Extensions, where it should read Included in Pro.
There is no Subscription tab on my product — the tab only appears once the product has been saved. Save it, then reopen the editor.
Plans do not appear on the product page — confirm subscriptions are enabled, the plan’s status is Active, and the plan is linked to that product.
A payment method vanished from checkout — that is the subscription rule in step 2. Venmo, cash on delivery and check cannot be charged automatically, so they are hidden on a subscription cart and the notice at the top of the payment step names them.
Renewals are not charging — check that auto-renewal is on, that the gateway is one of the four that can save a payment method (and, for PayPal, that saved payment methods are enabled on the live app), and that the site’s cron is actually running.
The store is emailed about a manual renewal — that subscription has no saved payment method, so TitanCart cannot charge it and is telling you to collect payment yourself. Turn the alert off in Notifications if you do not want it.
Customers cannot pause or cancel — switch on the matching option in the Customer Permissions card.
A subscriber lost their member pricing — membership follows the plan’s Customer Group. Check the subscription is still active and that the plan has a group set.