Feature of the week: Automatically pause subscriptions without active products

Managing subscriptions can be tricky—especially when your analytics are cluttered with subscriptions that don’t have any active products.

This week, we are showcasing a new feature that will provide more accurate insights into your subscription business.

What’s new? 👀

We’ve rolled out a feature that allows merchants to automatically pause subscriptions that don’t have any active products.

This can happen in a couple of scenarios:

• A customer removes all products from their subscription through the Self Service Customer portal (SSC).
• The last order of the subscription only contains one-time products, which become "owned" after the shipment.

Previously, these subscriptions were still considered active, which muddled analytics and created unnecessary subscription noise.

Now, merchants can clean up their analytics and streamline subscription management with this opt-in feature.

What are the benefits? 🤔

This feature isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a practical tool that helps merchants:

• Improve analytics accuracy: By automatically excluding subscriptions without active products, your analytics give a true picture of your subscription activity.
• Save time: Forget about manually reviewing and pausing subscriptions. Let automation handle it for you.
• Better customer experience: Customers won’t be tied to subscriptions they aren’t actively using, creating a cleaner and more intuitive experience for them.

How it works ⚒️

When enabled, this feature automatically pauses subscriptions without active products at 3:10 a.m. every night. Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

• Customers will see a note in their SSC dashboard if they have no active ordered products in their subscription.
• If they add new products before the pause moment, the note disappears and the subscription remains active.
• If they don't add new products, their subscription will get automatically paused the following night.

If a subscription is paused, it can be resumed through the usual SSC resume flow. We advise you to enable this option to allow your customers to seamlessly manage their subscriptions via the SSC.

What Is the setup process? 🔨

Setting this up is simple:

1. Go to the SSC settings in your merchant portal.
2. Enable the checkbox for Automatically pause subscriptions without active products.
3. Sit back and let the system handle the rest.

We allow our existing merchants to have control over their subscription management, so we’ve rolled this out as an opt-in option for existing projects.

However, we believe it’s a great addition that everyone will love, so it’s already enabled by default for all new projects.

Things to keep in mind 🧠

• Notifications are ready:
  • Subscription pause and resume webhooks are already available for merchants who prefer automated updates.
  • We’ve also added subscription-paused email notifications for merchants to process these events easily.
  • More email options will roll out in the coming weeks—stay tuned!
• Resume is always possible: If a subscription is paused, customers can resume it anytime through the SSC resume flow (if enabled) or by your support agents via the Firmhouse portal.
• Eligible projects only: This feature is currently available for smart order-based projects.

We know managing subscriptions can get messy, and this small but mighty feature is here to help.

By automatically pausing subscriptions without active products, you get cleaner analytics, better subscription management, and happier customers.

Have questions or feedback? Give us a shout. Otherwise, for more product features and updates, head on over to our Changelog.