What we're building, and why now.

A BC-native subscription engine that captures cleanly, bills reliably, and gives merchants and shoppers an experience that BigDesign-native apps are supposed to have.

Elaborated in PRD §3 pillars. D14 proposes a 4th pillar (membership as ENT wedge) — if accepted, this line expands accordingly.

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For most of BC's history, subscriptions have been an app-partner domain — Recharge, Bold, Sticky.io, MiniBC, Rebillia, Ordergroove, Chargify. The app-partner model created predictable friction: checkout bypass (partner checkouts replacing BC's), shopper-portal fragmentation, payment-vault gaps, and a ceiling on the quality-of-experience BC could offer its own merchants. BC's own Q1 2023 discovery (Product Pack (internal BC research, not available here) §3.2.3) rated merchant quality-of-experience on subscriptions at 3.2/5 across all plan tiers, with only 10% of merchants reporting zero issues. Checkout and Shopper Management dominated pain.

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BC merchants today pick between:

• Recharge on BC — no App Extensions integration (documented BC integration uses Script Manager injection and product modifier manipulation only; no BC control panel App Extensions on Orders, Products, or Customers pages referenced in any Recharge integration documentation — Recharge integration overview); customer-group price lists explicitly incompatible with the Recharge Checkout (Recharge BC feature compatibility); no Multi-Storefront support on the BigCommerce Checkout Integration (Recharge BC Checkout feature status); requires a separate Stripe, Braintree, or Authorize.net relationship — BC Payments is not a supported gateway on any Recharge BigCommerce integration path (Getting started: Next steps).

  Unverified — confirm before citing externally: Search snippets attributed to docs.getrecharge.com indicate Recharge ended active BigCommerce support December 31, 2025 with full EOL October 2026. Static page fetch did not surface this text (consistent with a dynamic banner). Browser-render the canonical URL to confirm. If confirmed, the integration gaps above are secondary — the primary finding becomes: Recharge is sunsetting BigCommerce entirely.

• Stripe Billing + custom glue — low platform fit, merchant operates two order systems and two payment relationships.

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Five pillars that define the product:

1. BC-native depth. App Extensions on Orders, Products, and Customers pages. Price Lists drive subscription-only pricing. Customer Groups segment subscribers. Multi-Storefront/channel-aware from day one. B2B Edition support (approval workflows, purchase orders) by Phase 3.
2. Orders are BC orders. Payments are BC Payments. Every recurring charge produces a native BC order and (for BC Payments merchants) settles through the merchant's BC Payments account into their BC Money dashboard. Inventory decrements, shipping engines, tax services, warehouse integrations, payouts, and reconciliation work through BC's existing surfaces rather than a parallel system. Other BC subscription apps today run the payment relationship through a separate Stripe/Braintree account outside BC Payments — a structural difference driven by product age, not ability.
3. Primary processor is BC Payments; Stripe is the alternate path. Reversed from v0.1. BC Payments (PPCP rails underneath) ships as the primary processor adapter because it removes an onboarding step for merchants already on BC Payments — no separate Stripe Connect signup, no second payout, no second dashboard. Stripe remains a fully-supported adapter for merchants already on Stripe who do not plan to switch.
4. Operationally observable. Every scheduled charge, retry, webhook, and order creation has a replayable audit record. Merchants can see why a renewal failed without opening a support ticket.
5. Headless-ready from MVP. Customer portal ships as both (a) hosted BC-iframe widget and (b) headless SDK for Catalyst / custom storefronts. No retrofit later.

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Referenced throughout by short name. Full profiles in PRD.md §5.

• Merchant Admin — primary buyer + daily user
• Subscriber — end consumer of the merchant's store
• Developer — BC agency or in-house engineer
• Support / Ops — merchant-side customer service / reconciliation

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Source: Product Pack (internal BC research, not available here) §2.3.

Model	Industry fit	Approx. share	Our coverage
Recurring Products	Consumables, vitamins, pet, coffee, personal care	~32% of all subscription purchases	prototypes/advanced-subs + core
Convertible	Equipment-with-refills (razors, printers)	Growing	prototypes/advanced-subs/prepaid adjacent
Build-a-box	Meal kits, curated collections	Fast-growing SMB	prototypes/advanced-subs/BuildABox
Curated	Stylist-chosen, replacement on cadence	Niche	Covered by bundling + build-a-box
Monthly Club	Wine, book-of-the-month	Mature, flat	Covered by recurring
Exclusive	Access-only (community, content)	Rising	prototypes/advanced-subs/Membership + D1 Entitlement
Brick-and-mortar	Gym, on-premise service	Small in BC context	Out of scope

Insight surfacing D14 (ENT wedge). Membership/access use cases (the "Exclusive" row) were raised only by Enterprise merchants in the research — Career Step, St John Ambulance, Fitness First/Debit Success (Product Pack (internal BC research, not available here) p.39). This is the evidence base for promoting membership to an explicit positioning pillar.

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