Project Overview

In 2018, before Shopify introduced native subscription capabilities, merchants who wanted subscription-based products had to build custom solutions. I built a full-featured subscription management app from scratch using Laravel and Stripe's Subscriptions API, solving a real business problem for a merchant whose entire revenue model depended on recurring orders.

The technical challenge was significant: Shopify and Stripe are two separate systems with no native integration for subscriptions at the time, so I had to architect a hybrid system that kept both platforms in sync throughout the full subscription lifecycle.

Architecture & Design

Hybrid Subscription Architecture

• Stripe for Payments: All recurring billing logic — subscription creation, renewal charging, payment failure handling, and cancellation — was managed by Stripe's Subscriptions API.
• Shopify for Fulfilment: Order creation, shipping, and fulfilment tracking remained entirely within Shopify, preserving the merchant's existing workflow and third-party integrations.
• Synchronisation Layer: Built a custom synchronisation layer between the two systems, ensuring every Stripe subscription event (renewal, cancellation, payment failure) had a corresponding action in Shopify.

Checkout & Subscription Tagging

• Frontend JavaScript Logic: Implemented client-side logic to tag subscription orders using Shopify line-item properties and order notes during the checkout process, distinguishing subscription items from one-off purchases.
• Webhook Processing: Processed Shopify Order Creation webhooks to automatically create and activate corresponding subscriptions in Stripe immediately upon purchase.

Renewal Order Management

• Automatic Renewal Orders: Developed backend workflows to generate new Shopify orders on each subscription renewal cycle, triggered by Stripe invoice payment success webhooks.
• Fault-Tolerant Handling: Built secure, fault-tolerant processing for subscription renewals, payment retries, dunning events, and order cancellations — ensuring no renewal was missed and no duplicate order was created.

Results

• Enabled the merchant to launch a subscription product line with zero platform support from Shopify.
• Processed hundreds of recurring payments monthly with zero synchronisation failures between Stripe and Shopify.
• Demonstrated that complex subscription logic could be built atop Shopify well ahead of the platform's native subscription feature launch.