# Subscription Orders
Orderwave lets you create and manage subscription-based orders to drive recurring revenue from your customers. Often called continuity orders, or auto-ship plans, subscriptions let your customers enroll in a plan to have orders automatically generated and charged for them.
Important
In order to automatically charge your customers, you will need a payment gateway that supports tokenized credit card payments. When tokens are stored in Orderwave, Orderwave can initiate payments.
# Subscription Profiles
Orderwave allows you to create "Profiles", or definitions of how the auto-generated orders should be created, which includes options for timing, shipping services & costs, and items and pricing.
To create a new Subscription Profile, navigate to and click the ➕ button.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Subscription Profile Key | This is the unique identifier for your new profile. |
| Subscription Profile Name | This is a reference name for the profile. |
| Subscription Profile Description | This is long description for the profile. Feel free to add as much detail as needed to describe the profile for your other team members. |
| Carrier / Service | Choose the shipment method/service that orders generated with this profile should receive. |
| Subscription Code Prefix | When customers subscribe to a profile, a Subscription is created. Each subscription will be assigned a unique subscription number (like an order number) that identifies the subscription. This field is the prefix that should be the first part of that subscription number. |
| Pad Number of Characters | The number of characters to pad newly created subscription codes. |
| Pad Character | The character to pad with. "0" (zero) is the most applicable character, since subscription codes are incremented integers. |
| Source Code | The string that will be used as the "source" of the order when the orders are created. |
# Subscription Profile Steps (Shipments)
You have the flexibility to generate different shipments for each "step" of the subscription program that your customers subscribe to. You implement this by adding different "steps" to the Subscription Profile.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Interval | The number of days from the subscription enrollment date to generate this shipment. |
| Repeat this step | Whether or not Orderwave should repeat the shipment step indefinitely. Only available on the last step of the profile. |
| Shipping Price | The freight charge for the shipment. |
| Item Quantity | The quantity of the item to ship. |
| Item Price | The price to charge for this item on the shipment. |
# Adding subscribers
There are 2 ways to create subscriptions in the Orderwave UI. You can create subscriptions manually by navigating to , or by subscribing a customer when viewing their existing order.
# Creating a subscription manually
Navigate to Subscriptions and click the ➕ button.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Subscription Profile | Choose an existing subscription profile to enroll this customer. |
| Start Date | The date that this subscription begins on (default is today). |
| Next Order Date | The date that the next order should be generated. |
| Customer | Customer information for the subscription. |
| Shipping Address | The address to ship auto-generated orders to. |
| Billing Address | The address to use as the billing address on auto-generated orders. |
| Payment Method | The method of payment for auto-generated orders. |
# Creating a subscription from an order
When viewing an order, you can "subscribe" the customer to an existing Subscription Profile, or any of the items on their current order. When viewing an order, click on the . If you are enrolling the customer into an existing subscription profile, choose the profile from the list and click "Create Subscription".
If you are subscribing the customer to an existing item on their order, click "Choose an item from this order", and fill in the required fields for the subscription.
TIP
When subscribing a customer to an item on their order, you're actually creating a custom subscription profile. You can customize their custom profile after creating it if needed.