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Stay.ai Integration

How the Onward x Stay.ai integration protects subscriptions and automatically cancels protection-only renewals.

What This Integration Does

If you sell subscriptions through Stay.ai and offer Onward's Checkout+ protection on them, this integration does two things:

  • Adds Onward protection to your customers' subscription plans, so subscribers keep the same purchase protection on recurring orders that they'd get on a one-time purchase.

  • Catches "protection-only" subscriptions before they renew. Sometimes the actual subscribed product gets removed, skipped, swapped for a one-time item, or goes out of stock — but the subscription itself keeps renewing. When that happens, the only thing left on the subscription is the Onward protection charge. Onward detects this the moment it happens, removing Onward and automatically canceling the subscription before it can turn into a real order.

What's New

We recently upgraded how this works:

  • Before: Onward would let a "protection-only" renewal go through as an order, then automatically refund it. Customers saw a charge followed by a refund, and merchants saw an unnecessary order.

  • Now: Onward listens directly for subscription updates from Stay.ai. The moment a subscription becomes protection-only, Onward cancels it immediately — before any order or charge is created. Customers never see the charge, and merchants never see the extra order/refund pair.

Setup Instructions

To set up the Stay AI integration with Onward, you'll need to complete two steps:

  1. Set up the subscription plans so Stay AI can carry Onward subscriptions.

  2. Set up the integration so Onward can communicate with your Stay AI account.

Step 1

  1. Log in to your Shopify admin and open the Stay.ai app

  2. Go to Subscription Setup > Selling Plans and add the Onward protection product to each selling plan

  3. In your Onward admin, enable the "Native Shopify subscriptions enabled" setting

  4. Confirm your selling plans show up correctly under the integration status in your Onward admin

Step 2

  1. Log in to your Shopify admin and open the Stay.ai app

  2. Go to Account > API Tokens

  3. Click New API Key

  4. Fill out the form as required and make sure you select "All" for the scopes

  5. In the list of tokens, click Copy button to copy the API Key to your clipboard

  6. In your Onward admin, go to Account > Integrations

  7. Find the Stay AI card and click "Install"

  8. Paste the API Key

  9. Click "Install"

Once set up, no further action is needed — detection and cancellation of orphaned subscriptions happens automatically in the background.

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