Concepts
Several key features form the foundation of Bold Subscriptions and the abilities of our APIs.
Widgets
Widgets are chunks of storefront code that create a UI and allow customers to purchase subscription products. Bold Subscriptions widgets can be added to landing pages, product pages, and checkout pages.
A Bold Subscriptions installation includes pre-built widgets to get your subscriptions up and running.
You can either customize a pre-made widget with CSS or create one from scratch.
Customer Portal
There is a powerful customer portal available to use out-of-the-box on the storefront. This portal includes pre-made functionality that allows the customer to manage most aspects of their subscriptions, including managing their billing and shipping information, swapping products, adding products, changing quantities, pausing and cancelling, and more. If you want to tweak the appearance of the out-of-the-box customer portal, you can make simple changes to the CSS.
If the out-of-the-box portal doesn't fit your needs, you can also create your own customer portal using the Bold Subscriptions API and Subscription Builder Customer API. Building your own Customer Portal requires a JSON Web Token (JWT) to authenticate customers.
Webhooks
Like webhooks in other interfaces, Bold Subscription webhooks are user-defined callbacks that are triggered by a specific event. You can use our webhooks to identify important subscriptions events, such as the creation of a subscription, the expiration of a payment method, or a user updating their account.
The Bold Subscriptions API enables you to listen to webhooks and act based on their responses.
Subscription Builder
The Subscription Builder integration is available to fully customize the customer's subscription experience on your storefront. Integrating Subscription Builder also allows your customers to create "build-a-box" subscriptions, in which they can create a unique box from a selection of choices.
Bold Subscription Builder is not publicly available for installation. Please reach out to our Bold Commerce Partners Team for more information on installing this integration.
The following image shows a high-level architecture diagram of the Subscription Builder integration:
Refer to the following pages for instructions on customizing some of the key subscriptions workflows:
Headless APIs
If you are not using an ecommerce platform such as Shopify or BigCommerce, you can use the Subscriptions API to integrate with your headless checkout solution. The Headless Storefront Setup guide gives more information on how to complete this task.