1. What the portal is
The customer portal is where your subscribers manage their own subscriptions instead of emailing you. It ships as a customer account extension — a page inside the customer's account on your storefront — and it inherits your store's branding. There's no Sublyra chrome and nothing that looks bolted on.
Subscribers see their active subscriptions, next delivery date, order history, and — depending on your settings — loyalty rewards, their referral code, and discounted add-on offers. Every action they take applies to the real Shopify subscription contract, not a copy, and every action is written to your audit log with the subscriber as the actor.
2. Enabling it for your store
1 Open Sublyra admin → Settings → Customer portal.
2 Click Enable in customer accounts — this takes you to Shopify's customer accounts settings, where the extension is switched on for your store.
3 Set your permissions (section 5) and save.
From then on, any logged-in subscriber finds the portal in their customer account, and a banner on the order-status page deep-links them to it after each order.
3. What subscribers can do
| Action | What happens | Controlled by |
|---|---|---|
| Skip the next delivery | The next order is pushed out by one full interval; the schedule after that continues normally | Skip permission |
| Reschedule | The subscriber picks a new date for the next delivery (tomorrow is the earliest selectable) | Always available |
| Pause | The subscription stops billing and shipping until resumed | Pause permission |
| Resume | A paused subscription goes active again. Always available — even if you disable pause, a subscriber who paused earlier can still come back | Always on |
| Swap products | Exchange the subscribed item for another variant of the same product — a different size, scent or grind | Swap permission |
| Cancel | Cancels the contract, subject to your cancellation flow and any minimum-commitment policy — see section 4 | Cancel permission |
| Update payment method | Sends the subscriber Shopify's secure card-update email so they can replace an expiring card themselves | Always available |
| Accept an upsell | Discounted add-on offers you configured under Settings → Upsells appear in the portal; one click adds the product to the subscription at the offer price | Upsells permission |
| View rewards & referrals | Loyalty credit balance, the rewards ladder and which tiers they've unlocked, plus their referral code and shareable link | Loyalty & rewards permission |
| View order history | Recent subscription orders with dates, status and totals | Always on |
4. The cancel experience
Cancellation in the portal is where your retention setup pays off — it's governed by two merchant-controlled layers:
Layer 1: minimum commitment. If the subscriber's plan has a min cycles policy (set on the selling plan), the portal blocks the cancel and tells them exactly how many orders remain — "This subscription can be cancelled after 3 billing cycles — 1 completed so far." This is enforced server-side, not hidden in the UI.
Layer 2: the cancellation flow. Your reason-to-save-offer mapping from Settings → Cancellation flow drives what the subscriber is offered when they go to cancel — a discount, a delay, a swap, a pause, or a route to support. A subscriber who accepts a save offer stays active with the offer attached; one who declines cancels, and the reason is recorded either way. That reason data is the most useful churn signal you get.
5. Merchant permissions
Everything above is togglable in Settings → Customer portal → What subscribers can do:
| Permission | What turning it off means |
|---|---|
| Skip a delivery | Subscribers can't push an order out; pause and cancel become their only levers |
| Pause subscription | No self-serve pausing. (Resume stays available regardless.) |
| Swap products | The variant-switch option disappears |
| Self-serve cancel | Cancelling requires contacting you — your save offers still run wherever else they apply |
| Portal upsells | Add-on offers don't render in the portal (product-page upsells are unaffected) |
| Loyalty & rewards | The credit balance and rewards ladder are hidden |
These are enforced server-side: a disabled action is refused by the portal itself, even if someone crafts the request by hand. Hiding a button is never the only line of defence.
White-label & custom CSS
The portal already inherits your shop's branding. For anything beyond that, the Custom CSS field on the same page accepts your own styles (shared with Settings → Developer, so both editors stay in sync).
6. Previewing as a subscriber
The same settings page includes a full preview so you can walk the experience before subscribers do:
1 Go to Settings → Customer portal and scroll to Preview as a subscriber.
2 Pick any customer from the View as subscriber dropdown. Their subscriptions, next delivery, rewards and order history render exactly as they'd see them.
3 Test the actions — skip, reschedule, pause, and the full cancel-and-save flow.
7. Measuring self-service
The Portal impact card at the top of Settings → Customer portal totals what subscribers have done for themselves:
- Self-serve actions — every skip, pause, reschedule and swap a subscriber made without contacting you.
- Deliveries skipped / Pauses — the cancellations that never happened because an easier option existed.
- Save offers accepted — saves vs total cancel attempts, with your save rate.
Every row is a support ticket you never received and, for the saves, revenue you didn't lose. The same events appear in the audit log (Settings → Logs, actor "subscriber") and in the churn analytics.
8. FAQ
Does the portal work with the new customer accounts or classic accounts?
The portal ships as a customer account extension for Shopify's customer accounts. Enable it from Settings → Customer portal → Enable in customer accounts, which links straight to the right Shopify settings page.
A subscriber says they can't cancel. Why?
Three possibilities: their plan has a minimum commitment they haven't completed (the portal tells them how many orders remain), you've disabled self-serve cancel in the permissions, or they're trying from the wrong place — the portal lives in their customer account, not the order confirmation email.
Can I do these actions on a subscriber's behalf?
Yes — use the preview on the same page to see their view, or manage the contract from Subscriptions. For changes to the live contract, the portal preview is deliberately local-only, so use Shopify admin or the subscriber-facing portal for real changes.
How do payment updates work for failed charges?
The payment-update action sends Shopify's own secure card-update email — the subscriber enters the new card on Shopify's page, and it's attached to their contract. It's available on any live contract, including ones in a failed-payment state, where it works alongside your dunning retries.
Do portal actions trigger my integrations?
Yes — a subscriber pausing or cancelling fires the same lifecycle events as any other status change, so connected tools like Klaviyo and your own webhook endpoints (see developers.sublyra.com) stay in step automatically.