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## Resource: Introduction

## Article: Introduction

## Article Link: https://dev.wix.com/docs/api-reference/business-solutions/e-commerce/payments/subscriptions/introduction.md

## Article Content:

# About the Subscriptions APIs

The Subscriptions APIs let you work with the subscriptions that buyers purchase through Wix eCommerce checkout, such as Wix Stores product subscriptions and Wix Pricing Plans plans. Apps and site owners can use them to read the terms of each subscription, keep external systems in sync with those terms, and change what a subscription includes from the next billing cycle onward.

The Subscriptions APIs include:

- [**Subscription Contracts**](https://dev.wix.com/docs/api-reference/business-solutions/e-commerce/payments/subscriptions/subscription-contracts/introduction.md): Retrieve the terms of a buyer's subscription, such as the items, prices, billing schedule, and buyer and shipping details. Listen to events when a subscription contract is created, updated, or deleted, or when changes to it are committed.
- [**Draft Subscription Contracts**](https://dev.wix.com/docs/api-reference/business-solutions/e-commerce/payments/subscriptions/draft-subscription-contracts/introduction.md): Change an existing subscription. Edit a temporary copy of its subscription contract, review the recalculated totals and tax, and commit the changes to apply them from the next billing cycle onward.

## How the APIs work together

A subscription goes through these stages:

1. A buyer checks out with subscription items. A subscription contract is created for each group of items that are billed together. Physical items from the same catalog with identical subscription settings share a subscription contract. Every other subscription item, such as each Wix Pricing Plans plan, gets its own subscription contract. So 1 checkout can create several subscription contracts.
1. The checkout order is the first order of every subscription contract created at checkout. After that, each billing cycle, a new [order](https://dev.wix.com/docs/api-reference/business-solutions/e-commerce/orders/orders/introduction.md) is created from each subscription contract's current content. In every order, each subscription line item's `subscriptionInfo.id` holds the ID of its subscription contract, and `subscriptionInfo.cycleNumber` holds the billing cycle the order is for.
1. To change a subscription, create a draft subscription contract from its subscription contract, add or update line items, and commit the draft subscription contract. The commit updates the subscription contract, so the orders of the next billing cycles are created with the changes.

## Before you begin

It's important to note the following points before starting to code:

- You can't create subscription contracts with these APIs. They're created when a buyer checks out with subscription items.
- Changes apply from the next billing cycle onward. You can't change an order that was already created for a subscription, either with these APIs or with the [Draft Orders API](https://dev.wix.com/docs/api-reference/business-solutions/e-commerce/orders/draft-orders/introduction.md), which doesn't support orders with subscription items.