Recurring Donations — Complete Setup Guide

Recurring Donations — Complete Setup Guide

Want to offer your customers the option to donate monthly, weekly, or annually? DonateMate supports recurring donations — but you'll need a subscription app to handle the billing side. Here's how it all fits together.

How Recurring Donations Work with DonateMate

DonateMate handles the donation experience — the widget, custom amounts, preset values, and add-to-cart flow. But for recurring billing, Shopify requires a subscription app to manage the selling plans and payment schedules.

Here's how the pieces fit together:

1. A subscription app (like Recharge, Seal Subscriptions, or PayWhirl) creates selling plans on your donation product
2. DonateMate's widget automatically detects those selling plans and displays them as options (e.g. "One-time / Monthly / Annually")
3. Your customer selects a frequency and adds to cart
4. The subscription app handles the recurring billing from there

In short: DonateMate = the donation widget. Subscription app = the recurring billing engine. They work together.

Step 1: Choose a Subscription App

You'll need a Shopify subscription app installed. Popular options include:

• Recharge Subscriptions — the most popular, well-tested with DonateMate. We have a dedicated Recharge guide.
• Seal Subscriptions — good free tier for getting started
• PayWhirl — another solid option

Any subscription app that creates Shopify selling plans should work with DonateMate.

Step 2: Create a Selling Plan for Your Donation Product

Once your subscription app is installed, you need to create a selling plan and assign it to your DonateMate donation product:

1. Open your subscription app's dashboard
2. Create a new subscription plan / selling plan group
3. Set the frequencies you want to offer (e.g. Monthly, Annually)
4. Assign the plan to your DonateMate donation product
5. Save

The exact steps vary by app — check your subscription app's documentation for specifics. If you're using Recharge, see our step-by-step Recharge guide.

Note: Make sure you assign the selling plan to the product, not to product variants. That way it will be available for all donation values.

Step 3: Check the DonateMate Widget

Once selling plans are assigned to your donation product, DonateMate will automatically show the frequency options in the widget. No extra configuration needed in DonateMate.

Visit your store and check the donation widget — you should see the subscription options appear alongside the one-time donation option.

If the options aren't showing:

• Make sure the selling plan is assigned to the correct DonateMate product
• Check that the selling plan is active (not draft) in your subscription app
• Ensure you have toggle Show Recurring on the donation widget
• Hard refresh the page (Cmd+Shift+R  on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+R  on Windows)

Managing Recurring Donations

Once customers are subscribed, you'll manage their subscriptions through your subscription app's dashboard (not DonateMate). That's where you can:

• View active subscriptions
• Cancel or pause a subscription
• See recurring revenue

Customers can also manage their own subscriptions from their Shopify account page — they can pause, skip, or cancel without contacting you.

Important Notes

• Payment gateway: Your payment gateway must support subscriptions. Shopify Payments works. Some third-party gateways don't — check yours.
• Customer accounts: Shopify subscriptions require customers to have an account, so make sure customer accounts are enabled in your Shopify settings.
• Custom amounts: Recurring donations support the same custom amount and preset options as one-time donations.

Questions? Drop us a line — happy to help get recurring donations running on your store. 😊