Aeion Commerce for Subscription Commerce
Subscription commerce — replenishment (coffee, beauty, vitamins, pet food), software SaaS, content + community, hybrid memberships. Aeion ships the full subscription state machine: recurring billing across Stripe / PayPal / Square, mid-cycle plan changes with proration, dunning workflows for failed payments, an AI-driven Retention agent for save-the-subscription flows, and a customer self-service portal.
Subscription Models Aeion Supports
Three common subscription shapes, all covered by the same subscription engine:
Subscription Lifecycle
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Mid-Cycle Plan Changes — Not a Built-In Feature Today
There's no plan-change/upgrade/downgrade function in Aeion Commerce's subscription service, and no proration calculation for customer-facing subscriptions — a customer's planId isn't something the platform has an orchestrated "swap and prorate" flow for. (Aeion does have proration logic, but it's for the platform's own module-license billing of tenants — a different system from a merchant's subscription-commerce customers.)
Dunning — Recover Failed Payments
Most subscription churn isn't customers cancelling — it's failed credit-card charges (expired cards, address mismatches, insufficient funds). Aeion's billing engine has a real dunning service that retries a failed charge on a policy-driven schedule (default: retry after 1, 3, and 7 days) rather than the specific 4-attempt, day-0/3/7/14 schedule with escalating reminder emails described in earlier drafts of this page — the retry cadence is configurable, but the reminder-email content/urgency-escalation and the final "subscription paused + flagged at-risk" step aren't a separately built dunning UX layer; they'd be assembled from the retry events plus your own notification templates.
AI Churn Prediction + Save-the-Subscription
The Retention agent runs daily, identifying subscribers at risk BEFORE they cancel. It looks at engagement metrics (logins, opens, click-through, usage time), payment failure history, support ticket volume and sentiment, plan downgrades (a strong signal), time since last login or order, and how similar subscribers who ultimately cancelled behaved.
Customer Self-Service Portal
Subscription commerce conversion is sensitive to the cancellation experience — fight cancellation too hard and you create chargebacks; make it too easy and you lose recoverable subscribers.
FAQ
Stripe Billing is the underlying billing engine; Aeion's subscription engine is the orchestrator. Stripe handles the recurring charge; Aeion tracks the business state (plan changes, dunning, churn risk, save-the-subscription workflows).
Yes — set a trial length on the subscription. Trial periods are free; first charge on day N+1. Card collected upfront; charge held until trial ends.
Not today — a subscription record ties to a single product/quantity from the originating order, not a multi-SKU basket. A subscription-box program with a rotating multi-item assortment would need custom modeling on top of this.
`paused` is a real status on Aeion's subscription record, distinct from `canceled` — but the auto-resume-after-N-cycles scheduling and any gateway-level pause API aren't wired up automatically; today, moving a subscription in and out of `paused` is a status update you trigger, not a scheduled gateway-level pause.
Refunds route through the standard order/payment refund mechanism — there's no dedicated "prorate the unused subscription period automatically" refund calculator; you'd compute the partial amount and issue it as a manual refund.
Not a built-in feature — there's no subscription-gift-code redemption flow linking gift cards to pre-paid subscription cycles today. A merchant wanting this would build it as a custom flow on top of the gift-card and subscription primitives.
The Tax module computes per-charge tax based on the customer's billing address. EU VAT customers see a VAT line; US sales tax is computed per state; UK VAT is computed per HMRC rules.