How to sell Shopify subscriptions through Whop

You can sell subscriptions on Shopify while the recurring card charge runs through your own Whop account. The selling plan stays in Shopify, so the product page, the price and the customer list work exactly as they do today, and Pendym replaces the checkout page so the payment and the renewal live at Whop instead.

Every renewal writes a new Shopify order back into your store, which means fulfilment, inventory and customer emails carry on as normal. This article explains how Shopify subscriptions usually work, what changes when the charge sits at Whop, how to set it up, and where the honest limits are.

How Shopify subscriptions normally work

A Shopify subscription has two halves that people often mix up.

The first half is the selling plan. That is a native Shopify object. It says a product can be bought on a repeating schedule, how often the schedule repeats, and whether there is a discount for subscribing. You attach a selling plan to products or variants, and Shopify shows the subscribe option on the product page.

The second half is the money. Shopify itself does not run the recurring charge. A subscription app manages the schedule and asks for each new charge against the payment method saved when the buyer first checked out, and the follow-on order then appears in your store. With Shopify's own subscription setup the card is stored and charged by Shopify Payments, so the recurring charge normally stays inside Shopify. That is why every Shopify subscription setup involves an app, and why it is worth knowing which account the charge actually runs through.

The important split: Shopify defines the schedule, and something charges the card on that schedule. The question worth asking of any setup is which account that charge runs through.

What is different when the recurring charge lives at Whop

Pendym replaces the Shopify checkout page with a hosted checkout that charges cards through your own Whop account. For subscriptions, the effect is a clean division of labour.

A Shopify selling plan in the cart becomes a recurring plan at Whop. The buyer pays on the Pendym checkout, the plan is created in your Whop account, and Whop takes the renewals from then on. Each renewal creates a new Shopify order, so your store still holds the record of what was sold and to whom.

Two things are worth being plain about. Shopify requires its own checkout for most stores on standard plans, and full checkout replacement is normally a Shopify Plus feature. Third party gateways can be connected on standard plans, but Shopify charges an additional transaction fee when you do not use Shopify Payments. Pendym is a different route, and you should check your own Shopify plan and read the section on limits below before you commit to it.

Setting up a selling plan in Shopify

This part is ordinary Shopify work and it does not change when you add Pendym. Selling plans are built through a subscription app or a custom app on your store, since Shopify does not give you a way to create one from the admin on its own, and once a plan exists you attach it to the products you want to sell on a repeating basis.

1. 1Decide the schedule you want to sell, for example every month or every three months.
2. 2Create the selling plan in Shopify and set the delivery frequency.
3. 3Set the subscription price or the discount against the one off price, if you are offering one.
4. 4Attach the selling plan to the products and variants it applies to.
5. 5Check the product page on your storefront and confirm the subscribe option appears with the right frequency and price.
6. 6Add the product to your cart as a subscription and carry on to checkout to see what a buyer sees.

If a product already has a selling plan attached from earlier work, you do not need to rebuild it. The selling plan is the part that stays in Shopify.

Connecting Pendym, step by step

Setup is three connections and takes about fifteen minutes.

1. 1Connect a Whop account. Paste your company id, which starts with biz_, an API key and a webhook secret. If you would rather not do that part yourself, Pendym can create a payment account in your name.
2. 2Connect your Shopify store with one click. This installs an app called Pendym Connector.
3. 3Turn Pendym on in your theme. There is a one click link that opens the Shopify theme editor with the app embed already switched on, and you press Save. If you prefer to do it by hand, paste one script line into theme.liquid before the closing body tag.

After that, place a test subscription order yourself and watch it land. You want to see the plan appear at Whop and the order appear in Shopify with the payment recorded.

What the buyer sees at checkout

The buyer adds the subscription product to the cart as usual. When they click through, they land on the Pendym checkout rather than Shopify's.

Pricing is quoted live from Shopify, so the numbers are your numbers: real shipping rates for the buyer's address, tax the way your store charges it, discount codes, and the buyer's Shopify Market currency. The checkout session is prepared while the buyer is still on the cart page, so the click through is a plain page change with the order already priced.

You control how it looks. Layout, colours, custom blocks, one page or two page flow, with a live preview while you set it up. You can also run it on a custom checkout domain such as checkout.yourstore.com through one CNAME record, which is verified before buyers are sent there.

<script src="https://pendym.com/shopify-snippet.js" data-store="YOUR_STORE_ID" defer></script>
</body>

Marketing pixels carry over. Paste your Meta, TikTok and Google IDs and the checkout reports view content, add to cart, begin checkout and purchase. You can also put order bumps in the summary, and post purchase offers charged to the card on file.

What you see for renewals, and how cancelling works

When a renewal is paid at Whop, a new Shopify order is written back with the payment recorded. That is the part that matters operationally. Fulfilment, inventory and customer emails work as before, because the renewal is a real Shopify order rather than a note in a separate system.

Cancelling is done from the Pendym dashboard, and that cancels the plan at Whop. There is one place to do it, which is worth knowing before you write your support macros.

Disputes are handled through Whop, since Whop is enrolled with the card networks. A dispute shows up in Pendym matched to the order with the response deadline, and you can file the evidence packet back to Whop in one click. Whop also sells optional Early Dispute Alerts at about $29 an alert, which you enable in your Whop dashboard.

What happens when a payment does not go through in full

If a payment comes in short, the matching Shopify order is marked partially paid and held for review rather than shipped. That is the behaviour to plan around: an underpaid order does not quietly go out of the door, it waits for you.

Beyond that, be careful about assuming. Pendym does not set out how a failed renewal is retried, or how updated card details are handled, so check how your Whop account deals with those before you move a live subscriber base across. Ask that question during your test order rather than after your first renewal cycle.

The cost side

Pendym has no monthly fee and no setup fee. It charges 0.3% per order.

The fee is billed to a card you verify with Stripe at signup rather than being taken out of your Whop payout, so a payout is never short. Whop's own processing fees apply as they would on any Whop sale, so factor those in as well. On a subscription product, remember the fee applies per order, and a renewal is an order.

Honest limits, and who this is not for

This is a checkout and a payment route, not a full subscription management suite. It is worth being clear about what that means.

• Complex plan types such as prepaid subscriptions, or swap and skip flows for the customer, are not part of what Pendym describes. If your model depends on those, check carefully before you commit.
• Cancelling is done from the Pendym dashboard, so expect your team to handle cancellation requests. Pendym does not describe a customer facing portal, so check that before you promise self service.
• Migration of existing subscribers is a real project. Payment methods on file with your current subscription app do not travel to Whop by wishing it, so plan how existing subscribers move before you switch anything.
• Renewal failure handling is not something Pendym sets out. Check how your Whop account handles it first.
• Pendym is a young product. If you run a large subscriber base and cannot tolerate surprises, that is a reasonable thing to weigh.

It fits best if you are already using Whop, or want to, and your subscription is a simple repeating charge on a schedule. It fits badly if you need deep subscriber self service, prepaid terms, or gift and swap mechanics.

Trying it without painting yourself into a corner

The reassuring part is that this is reversible. You can switch the Pendym checkout off at any time in Settings, and your store's checkout button goes back to Shopify's own checkout on the next page load. There is nothing to remove from your theme afterwards.

So a sensible trial looks like this: build one selling plan on one product, connect the three pieces, place a test subscription order yourself, and watch the plan appear at Whop and the order appear in Shopify. If the renewal writes back the way you need it to, widen it out. If it does not suit you, turn it off.