Subscriptions
What you’ll achieve: a membership product your members can buy, billed automatically on the schedule you set.
Prerequisites: a working Stripe connection so members can pay.
Read the transcript
Monthly fees? With subscriptions, your club gets paid every month… without chasing anyone. Four steps. Let's go!
One: connect your bank. In Sales, Subscription, click Connect to Stripe. Stripe asks for your club's details, your bank account and a quick identity check. About ten minutes, just once.
Two: create your subscription. Click Add Product: name, description, price… and how often it's charged: every month, every three months or every year. Status: On Sales. Save!
Three: it's now in your online store, in your club's private web app and in the Volley World app. Your players choose their plan, become members and pay the first fee. And from then on, it renews by itself, month after month.
Four: upload your schedule. If your trainings are for subscribers, choose Included in the membership at the Price step. Subscribers sign up without paying anything extra. And anyone without a subscription sees a notice to get one in your store. Fees up to date, without chasing anyone. That easy!
The full walkthrough, step by step — what to sell, price and billing, card or SEPA, requirements and the share link:
Read the transcript
Monthly fees that collect themselves? That's a subscription. Let's build one, card by card.
First: what are you selling?
A flat rate: one price, and members train as often as they like.
Or a set number, like five classes a month: every payment gives them five new classes.
In Sales, Subscription, add a product.
The basics: an image, a name, and what's included.
Then the included trainings: link your five-class package… or leave it empty for a flat rate.
Price and billing: sixty-five euros, every month.
Every three months, or every four weeks?
Just set the period.
Someone joins on the twentieth?
Charge the full price, only the days left, or nothing until the first of next month.
How do your members pay?
By card, by SEPA Direct Debit, or both: then the member chooses.
Cards confirm instantly, with Apple Pay or Google Pay, and a declined card costs you nothing: Stripe can simply try it again.
SEPA saves your club half a percentage point on every payment, and bank accounts don't expire.
Say sixty members pay sixty-five euros a month: SEPA saves about thirty-three cents per member, every month.
In a year, that's two hundred and thirty-four euros for your club: three new match balls!
Good to know: with SEPA, access starts right away, and the first debit confirms within a few business days.
There's just one small fee to keep in mind: three euros fifty, and only if a debit fails, for example when the member's account is empty.
Payments that go through just carry your usual fee, half a point lower with SEPA.
And with a card, even a failed payment costs you nothing.
If a first debit fails, the subscription simply ends; for a renewal, you're both notified, and the member has seven days to pay.
Access and requirements.
Select the federation licence: only members with a valid one can subscribe.
Add your sign-up form, approved manually or automatically.
Selling the season early?
With an early access date, members subscribe now and pay from that day.
And your terms and conditions.
Advanced options: custom fields, for your Stripe dashboard.
Save!
Want it off the store?
Switch In store off: then only people with your share link can buy it.
Perfect for a loyalty price.
Your player picks the plan in the app, chooses SEPA, enters their IBAN… and they're in.
Fees that collect themselves. That easy!
- In Subscriptions, open New Subscription Product.
- Set the Status — On Sales (visible and buyable), Sold Out, Invisible or Archived.
- Under Basic Details, enter a Product Name and Description, and optionally a banner image.
- Under Pricing & Billing, set the Unit Price, Currency, Billing Period (Day, Week, month or Year) and Interval Count (e.g. every 1 month).
- (Optional) under Additional Options, choose First Period Billing, require licences or forms, set an Early Access Date or a Terms & Conditions URL.
- Tap Save.
What you can attach to a subscription
Section titled “What you can attach to a subscription”Three optional extras turn a plain recurring charge into a gate:
| Attach | What it does |
|---|---|
| A form | The sign-up asks the member to complete one of your forms before they can confirm. |
| One or more licences | The sign-up walks the member through buying a licence first — useful for a one-off or yearly membership fee. |
| A training package | Every payment grants the member a fresh batch of session credits. |
How the training package works
Section titled “How the training package works”This one runs on the server, so it is reliable:
- A package is created on the first payment and on every renewal, once per invoice.
- Its credits are valid for exactly the period that payment covered — an “every 4 weeks” subscription grants a package valid for four weeks.
- Each credit is spent when the member is signed in to a session, and the remaining count goes down. That is how you see how often someone actually attends.
- Cancelling does not claw back a package that was already granted; it simply lapses at the end of its period.
Card or direct debit
Section titled “Card or direct debit”A subscription can be paid by card (including Bizum, Apple Pay and Google Pay) or by SEPA Direct Debit from the member’s bank account. Choose per product: Card and SEPA Direct Debit, SEPA Direct Debit only or Card only. Direct debit is the recommended method for memberships: it costs 0.2 points less per payment. The first debit takes a few business days to confirm; the member has access from the moment they sign up.
The club pays €3.50 for a returned debit and €15 for a debit the member reverses through their bank (possible within 8 weeks).
One Stripe setting to switch on. By default Stripe does not retry a returned direct debit. In your club’s Stripe account, open Billing → Revenue recovery → Retries (dashboard.stripe.com/revenue_recovery/retries) and enable retries under Local payment methods. Stripe then retries a debit returned for insufficient funds up to twice within 30 days, and those retries carry no return fee.
What a membership costs the club
Section titled “What a membership costs the club”Every subscription payment carries one total cost, plus 0.7% of the billed amount for recurring billing, charged once a month on the club’s Stripe balance (not per payment). For a Club PRO club:
| €55 monthly membership | Per payment | Recurring billing | Total cost | The club receives |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paid by card | €1.35 | €0.39 | €1.74 | €53.26 |
| Paid by direct debit | €1.24 | €0.39 | €1.63 | €53.37 |
For comparison, a €13 single ticket paid by card costs €0.51; the club receives €12.49. Rates for every plan are in pricing & limits.
Billing cycles
Section titled “Billing cycles”Pick a unit — day, week, month or year — and an interval count for how many of them pass between charges. “Every 3 months” is month with a count of 3; the “4 week cycle” you see on a product card is week with a count of 4.
The count is capped per unit: 365 days, 52 weeks, 12 months, or 1 year — Stripe does not allow an interval longer than a year.
When a payment fails
Section titled “When a payment fails”A failed renewal appears in the Failed payments feed with the status Ongoing, which simply means it has not been recovered yet. It becomes Resolved by itself as soon as a later attempt succeeds.
The member is not cut off the moment a charge fails — access continues for now, and lapses only if the subscription is still unpaid more than three days past the end of the period.
Cancelling
Section titled “Cancelling”Both sides can cancel, and the two are not the same:
- A member cancels from your club’s web store. This is always at the end of the period — they keep access until the time they already paid for runs out, and they can resume before then. In the phone app they are sent to Stripe’s billing portal instead, where what they can do depends on how your Stripe account is configured.
- You cancel from the subscriber’s row, and you choose: Cancel at Period End, or Cancel Immediately.
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting””The price must be greater than 0”
A subscription needs a positive unit price. For a free membership, use a different mechanism — a subscription product must be priced above zero.
The product name is rejected
Names allow letters, numbers and -_.&/ only; other special characters are refused. The description is required and capped at 500 characters.
There’s no share link
The Share Subscription Link appears only after the product exists — that is, in edit mode. Save first, then reopen the product to copy its link.