Plugins

Last Updated: 2023-10-29 02:00:08

The subscriptions plugin is complex and supports many options. It comes at an additional cost due to it's use of transactions. Using this plugin you can create subscriptions and collect recurring payments from customers in exchange for access to a service and/or product.

Subscriptions are divided into three components, the subscription itself, services and the packages they consist of.

The subscription itself defines discounts, payment options, duration and renewal behavior. It's possible to create both a yearly and monthly subscription with the yearly subscription having a 10% discount. The monthly subscription can be attached to the yearly as a renewal option. This means that after the yearly subscription ends, the customer is switched to the monthly subscription and it's pricing model.

Note: A customer can only subscribe to one subscription at a time, however, there is a configuration option called MultiSubscriptions which can remove this restriction. It's important to organize your subscription groups when enabling this option.

Services and packages define details about your subscription and provides a way to add optional features at additional costs. The information collected includes a title, description and brief package points outlining key details about a service.

Services and packages also define what a subscription will cost. A subscription can have several services and a service can have several packages. Each service can be priced and any packages attached to a service can also have mandatory or optional cost. The total price of the subscription is the sum of services and additional package prices, plus optional packages that is determined when a customer chooses to add them.

Lets take a look at an example.

You decide to create a 1 year Gold Membership subscription with two services at 9.99 each. The services are Early Access and Exclusive Deals each having a description and package points assigned. The subscription would look something like this.

Early Access ( Gold members get exclusive access to new arrivals and pre-orders )

Packages
New arrivals and pre-orders
Shop 1 week in advance

Exclusive Deals ( Gold members get special deals and discounts on items )

Packages
Exclusive deals!
Members pricing

Since there are no packages with any additional prices, the subscription cost is 19.98 for 1 year.

The primary purpose of a subscription is to collect recurring payments for a service and/or product. However, sometimes it's more convenient to offer a full payment option. This usually comes with some kind of discount.

The subscriptions plugin supports full payments and subscription discounts. When enabling full payments, the plan can be paid for in full as an additional option to the regular monthly installments. A discount can be applied to the full payment option. If both a standard discount and full payment discount are applied to the subscription then will one or the other is applied based on the customers actions.

Note: Discounts are based on the total price per payment term and full price if full payment option is used.

Renewals are an important part of subscriptions, they are a means to continue on-boarding customers when their initial subscription ends. Subscription renewals have several options to accommodate your needs and below are details outlining each option.

No Renewal

Once the customers' subscription ends there will be no more recurring payments. A customer will have to signup for the subscription again.

Renew Identical & Updated

When a customer signs up for a subscription, that subscription may go through changes over time including but not limited to the services offered and pricing. When that subscription ends and transitions into a new subscription either the original or updated plan gets renewed. These are the options available for your website.

Note: A good and common example of identical renewals is with cellphone service subscriptions where as a customer continues an old plan because of a great price they got.

Renew Subscription

A subscription can transition into a another subscription plan during the renewal process. The most common example of this is a yearly to monthly subscription where the yearly subscription is obtained at a discount and transitions into a monthly plan at regular price afterwards.

There are two types of cancellations that can be performed on an active subscription. The difference is determined on who is requesting the cancellation. When a customer cancels a subscription then the period remaining will continue until the renewal. For example, canceling a monthly subscription means the current month is paid and will remains active until the following month.

This approach is logical but doesn't always make sense especially for yearly subscriptions where the customer wants to cancel abruptly. A customer cannot force a cancellation, they must contact you and request it. As the service provider, the option to force a cancellation is available in the administrative portal. This means the subscription will end prematurely and a partial refund must be issued.

The refund is calculated as subscriptions price based on duration and term broken down into days where the remaining days total is refunded. Full payments are taken into account.

Fliddo is working hard to automate features to simplify tasks for you, however, not everything is automated. Fliddo is working on subscription refund automation, however, this may not be ready. You can issue a refund manually in the administrative portal.

Note: There is a configuration option to add a fee for early subscription cancellations.

The subscription plugin supports applying taxes to subscriptions and is based on rules defined and imported form the billing plugin taxation feature. Please read the billing plugin documentation for more information on how to setup taxes for services and/or products.

Exemptions & Reductions

Any tax exemption and/or reduction defined in the billing plugin taxation feature can be applied to a subscription.

Roles are a key feature of your fliddo website and provides a way to control and restrict content. This plugin supports roles and allows them to be assigned to subscriptions and service packages.

There are a couple options available to configure the behavior of this plugin. The following options are available.

CancellationFee

Define a cancellation fee for prematurely cancelled subscriptions.

MultiSubscriptions

Allow customers to signup for more than one subscription.

DiscountPercentMax

Set the maximum allowed discount for subscriptions. This is a great way to prevent accidental mistakes when applying discounts.

BillingRetryLimit

This is the number of attempts to make in order to process payment when the initial charge fails.

LeewayAllowed

The number of days to allow a customer to rectify a failed payment before the subscription is deactivated.

ShowCurrency

Allow the currency convertor to be used in templates. The default convertor includes a drop-down list of serviceable currencies.

CurrencySimple

This option simplifies the currency convertor and reduces the currency list to US dollars and the customers origin currency.

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