Step-by-step guide on how to migrate from Recharge to Shopify Subscriptions [2024]

In the world of subscriptions, there are dozens of different subscription apps on the market. While most of them are similar, there are some differences from time to time, so merchants might want to migrate to a different app for any reason, to see if it will fit them more. Popular subscription apps include Recharge subscriptions, Shopify subscriptions, Bold subscriptions, Seal Subscriptions (which is by far the best on the market), and more. While these apps do share functionalities, often the biggest turnaway for merchants is their pricing plans and transaction fees. For example, Recharge can be very expensive, especially with their transaction fees. If you wan to see cost comparison you can refer to this article, where we look at in-depth comparison between Seal and Recharge.

Popular app is also Shopify Subscriptions, Shopify's official subscription app. Since you might dislike Recharge for their functionalities, or pricing plans, you are wondering how exactly can you migrate to Shopify Subscriptions app.

In this article we will first show you a quick overlook of Shopify Subscriptions and Recharge subscriptions and then show you all the steps that you need to migrate from Recharge to Shopify Subscriptions. Then later, we will show you just how simple it is compared to migrating from Recharge to Seal where all you need is just an API key.

Overview of Shopify Subscriptions

Shopify Subscriptions is a quite new app on the market, released in 2024. It is an app officially developed by Shopify, so the app doesn't really have that many features available yet. The app allows you to make subscription plans, where you basically select the products that you wish to have subscriptions, select a discount and delivery, where discount can either be percentage off, amount off or flat rate. And delivery frequency simply means how often do you wish your customers that select this plan can receive the products that they subscribed for. In Shopify Subscriptions you can also see an overview of your contracts. Contracts are your customers, that have purchased a subscription from your store. In short, they are your subscribers and they will appear in the contracts page. This is also the page where you can import your existing subscriptions in a CSV format. Last page in the app is the settings page where you can manage things like payment failure settings, subscription widget, subscription management url and subscription notifications.

Overview of Recharge

Recharge subscriptions is another popular subscription app. Although it does offer some functionalities like other subscription apps, it is on the pricier side. The cheapest plan in Recharge is $99 per month, which is a lot compared to other subscription apps, such as Seal Subscriptions, where they offer a free plan and the cheapest paid plan is only $4.95 per month and 0% transaction fees on all plans! Recharge has basic features such as customer portal, bundles, analytics & insights, cancellation flow, etc…

How to migrate from Recharge to Shopify Subscriptions

On to the main thing. You might be wondering how exactly you can get your subscriptions from Recharge to Shopify subscriptions. While we will show you the whole process, you will later see that migrating from Recharge to Seal Subscriptions is not only much easier (with a click of a button), but also enables you so much more features!

Here are the main steps on how you can migrate from Recharge to Shopify Subscriptions:

1. Get the CSV file from Recharge

If you used new Shopify checkout then use Recharge's Export builder.

1. In the merchant portal, click Data and select Exports
2. Click Create Exports
3. Under Select export type, click the dropdown and select your desired export, You might need to select all the available exports such as order exports, customer exports and subscription exports. This process might be a bit more complicated since you will need to manually merge all of the exports,
4. Enter a custom export name (optional) and your e-mail address. On some reports, you can choose to select a date range of up to 90 days,
5. Click Create Export

Once your export is created, a download link will be sent to the email address provided in the Exports tool or you can also download a copy of the export from the main Exports page. Then click the download icon under Actions to download the file as CSV.

If you used the old Recharge checkout, then use legacy exports in Recharge

1. In the merchant portal, click Data and select Exports
2. Click Access the old export page here
3. On the Exports page, click Email report under the CSV report you would like to access. You might need to select all the available exports such as order exports, customer exports and subscription exports. This process might be a bit more complicated since you will need to manually merge all of the exports.
4. Enter in your email address and specify a date range (if applicable)
5. Click Send. 

You should now get the CSV file on your email address that you provided.

2. Go to Shopify Subscriptions → Contracts

Here you will see all of your imported subscribers. In the top right corner click “Import”

3. Import the CSV you got from Recharge

You can also download the Shopify Subscription's sample CSV file, where you can see how they formatted it. If your Recharge CSV file is formatted differently, you will need to make it so that it will be formatted the same as Shopify Subscriptions.

Once you have done that, simple click on “Add file” and select your downloaded CSV file.

4. And that's it! You should have successfully imported the file to Shopify Subscriptions. If you go to Shopify Subscriptions → Contracts you should see the existing subscriptions here.

Seal Subscriptions - The better alternative for subscriptions

We will present to you now the app that will simplify everything to you - best subscription app Seal Subscriptions. Not only migration from Recharge is very easy, Seal also has features other subscription apps might not have. And unlike other subscription apps, Seal has 0% transactions on all subscriptions. With Seal you can do a lot, such as:

• Creating subscription rules where you can make auto-charging and recurring invoices rules. A subscription rule is basically a selection of selling plans defined by you, which means that your customers will be able to pick a selling plan to the product that they wish to subscribe to. In subscription rules you also define things like delivery intervals, billing intervals, requirements, discounts, automatic discount modifications, pre-paid selling plans, and much more.
• Enable the option to automatically propagate/sync price changes to products in subscriptions,
• Various shipping options such as updating delivery costs when something happens,
• Adding tags to active, inactive and paused subscribers,
• Loyalty discounts to give additional discounts to your loyal subscribers that have been subscribed to certain products for some time,
• Product swaps, where you can add, remove, or replace products automatically. This is great if you would like to automatically swap specific products in subscriptions on certain intervals, or add a gift item to subscriptions after a specific payment,
• Automated interval changes, where you can set the app to automatically change intervals in your subscriptions,
• Analytics where you can oversee your churn rate, growth rate, retention rate, inventory forecast, and more,
• Completely customizing the subscription widget to your liking to fit with your store and brand,
• Setup various cancellation flows, to reduce the cancellations of your subscriptions. You can add as many reasons as you would like and even give your customers an option to list their own reason,
• Inventory settings that can help you setup out of stock settings such as getting a weekly email about products with insufficient inventory or skipping automatic renewals if one or more products are out of stock,
• Text & Translations settings where you can translate pretty much everything in the widget,
• Notifications & Emails where you can control automated interactions with your customers,
• And many many more!

As you can tell, Seal Subscriptions offers A LOT of features that you can play around with. Not only that, but the big thing here is that it has a completely FREE plan that can allow you up to 150 total subscriptions, subscription discounts, inventory forecast, custom email HTML, automated product swaps, and more. This way, you can install the app completely for free and get the feel of it, and later decide if you would like to upgrade to a paid plan or not. And we guarantee you, that you will not regret using Seal Subscriptions, since it has everything that you will ever want for having subscriptions in your store. As mentioned, Seal also has a 0% transaction fee on ALL subscriptions, which is a crazy good deal.

You can even integrate Seal with other popular Shopify apps such as Bundler, where you can combine bundles with subscriptions and then customers can subscribe to products within bundles.

Migrating the easy way: How to migrate from Recharge to Seal Subscriptions

Now that we showed how you can migrate from Recharge to Shopify Subscriptions, we will also show you just how easy alternative it is to migrate to Seal Subscriptions instead. You will not have to download any CSV files here and there will be no need to format anything.

Migrating from Recharge to Seal Subscriptions can save you a lot of time. For example, if you have 200 subscriptions, in the example of migrating from Recharge to Shopify Subscriptions, where you will have to manually format the CSV file in order to import your subscriptions, it can take you more than 6 hours of work, especially if you never worked with CSV files before. In Seal, all of those hours can be saved with a simple click ;) Here are the instructions on how you can achieve that:

1. Install Seal Subscriptions app

2. Go to Seal Subscriptions → Subscriptions → Bulk import subscriptions

3. In the ‘Which platform are you migrating from’ pick Recharge

4. In the ‘Where did your customers complete the intial subscription order?’ pick either 'Recharge Checkout and Shopify Checkout' or ‘Shopify Checkout’ depending on which method you used before

If you picked Shopify Checkout, then all you need to do is get the Recharge API key and your subscriptions should be correctly imported :)

Getting the Recharge API key is very simple, all you need to do is:

1. Login to Recharge merchant portal
2. Navigate to Apps and click API tokens
3. On the following page, click Create an API token to generate a new token for your store
4. Use the Details fields to set a name and contact email for the token
5. Select No access, Read access, or Read and Write access to set the scope permissions you'd like to grant the token
6. Click Save to create your token.

However, if you picked Recharge Checkout and Shopify Checkout, then you will need to select the payment gateway.

5. In the ‘Which payment gateway are you using’ pick the one that you are using.

If you pick Stripe or Braintree, then all you need to do is get a Recharge API key and Stripe/Braintree API keys, depending which one you picked and your subscriptions should be correctly imported :)

6. In the case you are not using Stripe or Braintree, you will need to import the Recharge's CSV file described further above in this article and format it so that it will match Seal's CSV format (that you can also find in the instructions). This is the only method when it comes to migrating from Recharge that requires a CSV, however the team is working to implement the integration via API also for other payment gateaways :)

Conclusion

That's basically it! You now see how to import your subscriptions from Recharge to both Shopify Subscriptions and Seal Subscriptions. Both apps are good on its own. Other than that we really strongly recommend you check out Seal Subscriptions, since it will help your business in more ways than one and you will quickly see the growth of your revenue!

If you are interested you can also check out our other articles such as best bundle app for Shopify or tips for setting up bundles in Shopify if you are interested in bundles. Bundles can significantly help you with promoting products in your store and you can even use them with subscriptions to further enhance your customers shopping experience! :)

Happy e-commerce building!