Manually charging a subscription (Order Now)
Charge a subscription on demand from the admin or let the customer trigger it themselves, plus how Order Now interacts with dunning.
Order Now charges a subscription contract right now and creates an order for the next-due cycle. It's the fastest way to:
Verify a payment method works after updating it
Recover a customer's subscription after a Failed status
Give an early refill to a customer who's running low
Both you and the customer can trigger Order Now from the same dropdown menu, they're equally allowed to do it.
Where to trigger Order Now
From the admin
Open the contract from Subscriptions → Manage Subscriptions.
Click Manage subscription ▾ in the contract header.
Choose Order now (the first item in the menu).
Roadmap immediately attempts the charge using the contract's current payment method. If it succeeds, an order is created and shipped on the standard schedule for that contract.
From the customer's account page
The customer goes to My Subscriptions, opens Manage Subscription ▾, and chooses Order now. Same charge, same order creation.
What Order Now does
Bills the customer immediately using the contract's current payment method.
Creates an order in Shopify for the next-due cycle's products and quantities, including any one-off additions staged on that order.
Sends the customer Shopify's standard order confirmation, whether you or they triggered it. Every line carries its subscription reference and cadence, for example
Subscription, Delivery every 7 days, so the customer can see the order came from their subscription rather than a new purchase.Refreshes the contract for the next cycle once the order is processed, so one-off additions are used up and the following delivery returns to the contract's usual products.
Logs the action in the Activity Timeline with the actor (customer or merchant) recorded.
Records loyalty points if the customer is enrolled in a loyalty program.
What Order Now does not do
It does not initiate dunning if the charge fails. Manual charges are excluded from the dunning state machine, so only automatic billing kicks off dunning. A failed Order Now leaves the contract in whatever state it was in.
On a healthy contract, it does not advance the recurring schedule beyond the cycle it just billed. The next scheduled cycle stays on the calendar at its normal date. Recovering a dunning contract is the exception, see below.
It does not change the contract's status (Active stays Active, Paused stays Paused, though Order Now from a Paused contract isn't typically allowed).
Order Now during dunning
This is the most-asked-about behavior. The rules:
Order Now succeeds during a dunning window
The contract exits dunning. Roadmap detects that a later cycle has been billed successfully, treats the failed cycle as superseded, and stops retrying it.
The contract's Last Payment Status flips back to Successful, the dunning Timeline marks the relevant retry as no-longer-needed, and the contract leaves the Failing filter view.
The contract is then rescheduled according to its delivery frequency, counted from the successful charge rather than from the cycle that failed. A monthly contract recovered today bills again a month from today.
Order Now fails during a dunning window
Nothing changes. The contract stays where it was, the existing dunning schedule continues uninterrupted, and the failed Order Now is logged in the Activity Timeline as a separate manual-charge attempt, but it doesn't add a new dunning retry.
This is intentional: a manual charge that fails because the merchant or customer was poking at things shouldn't double-up the dunning cadence.
Using Order Now to recover a Failed contract
Update the customer's payment method
Use the Update payment method modal on the contract page, see Updating a customer's payment method.
If you skip step 2 and reactivate before verifying, the contract will likely fail again on its next dunning attempt and end up back in Failed.
Customer-driven Order Now
Customers can use Order Now for the same reasons you can, to get an early shipment when they've run out faster than expected. There's no charge limit per cycle, and each charge counts as a normal subscription order for loyalty-points and customer-history purposes.
If a customer asks for an early shipment over chat or email, you can either guide them to Order Now themselves or run it from the admin on their behalf.
What Order Now is not for
Charging an arbitrary amount. Order Now bills the upcoming order as it stands. To change what that order contains, add a one-off product to it, or edit the contract when the change should apply to every future order.
Skipping a future cycle. That's Skip next delivery, not Order Now. Skip defers the next charge to the cycle after; Order Now brings a charge forward.
Replacing dunning. On a healthy contract, automatic dunning still runs on its configured schedule. Order Now is a tool for a specific cycle, not a global retry button.
Activity Timeline entries
Every Order Now is recorded in the contract's Activity Timeline with:
The actor (customer email if customer-initiated, merchant email if admin-initiated)
The cycle it billed
Success or failure
The order number created (on success)
For details on the Timeline, see The Subscription Activity Timeline.
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