Customers can purchase or renew paid subscriptions. Our system can generate passwords and provide instant login access to secure areas of your website. Our system can automatically generate and monitor expiry dates subscriptions, send reminders for renewals, and manage the renewal process.
Example Use Cases
- Club or Society Membership
- Recipies or Health Consultant Subscription
- Fresh in season food delivery service
- Regular flower delivery service
- Gym Memberships
- Expert Consultancy Service
- Farm Advisor
- Legal Documents / HR Templates Repository
- Business Networking Group
Process To Create Subscription Management
- Create or Use an existing shopping page, of any layout template is ok.
- Add products with the price and description of the membership term
- Edit the automation options for the product, to create a membership, email a password, and automatically manage the expiry date of the membership.
- There are several membership levels to choose from, and you can segment your member into groups as well.
- Sending of passwords is optional, if you are primarily selling a real world subscription for being on a mailing list, receiving magazines, or other products by post.
Customer Subscription Process
- Customers add a subscription product to their shopping cart and checkout.
- Once they have paid for their order, their membership status is updated, their new expiry date is set, and they can login and access pages that only authorised members can access while they have a current and valid subscription.
- For longer term memberships, customers are notified by email twice prior to the expiry of their membership to renew their membership. This email is completely customisable.
- For short term memberships, the membership/subscription can be setup as a recurring order/payment.
- Customers can follow a link in the renewal email, or simply purchase another membership product. Either process will renew their membership for the appropriate term, after they have paid. The new membership term is added to the end of their current term, so they can safely renew their membership at any stage.
Payment Options and Discounts
- Any payment provider compatible with our shopping cart can be used with our long term subscription management system. This works best when you offer terms between 3 months and annually.
- If you are using WindCave billing ID payment system, then customers can setup a recurring order/payment, that will automatically deduct their payment upon each repetition of the order. This is good for monthly/weekly subscriptions, as we will track the payment against each order. The payment is actioned shortly after the recurring invoice is issued.
- Some payment providers provide their own subscription management system, or their payment plan options. If you are using a payment plan, you will need to monitor for non payment yourself. Our system will assume the payment plan is in progress until the expiry term specified by the products "contract term" (aka membership duration) the customer selected.
- If you learn that a customer has terminated a payment plan, you would then need to cancel their subscription in the CMS. The successful payment of the first part of a plan is sufficient for our system to authorise the full term of the membership contract, by setting the expiry date to the end of the contract.
- You can initiate payment plan options for certain payment providers from our checkout process. E.g. Stripe and Paypal. Some Payment providers provide term payment options by default, eg Oxipay and Laybuy. Please contact us to setup custom payment plan integrations for other payment providers.
- You can optionally use our checkout to take only a deposit from the customer. Payment of the deposit will action a full membership, and you can then manage the remainder of the term payments via your own accounting system.
- You can edit any members expiry date, for example to offer a free month.
- You can offer discounts, sell vouchers, redeem vouchers, etc. Our loyalty points program is useable with membership subscriptions and renewals.
Sending Newsletters to Your Membership
- You can send adhoc emails to all your membership as you like.
- You can send emails only to members who are near expiry, or who have expired.
- You can send emails or members who have birthdays near, etc.
Other Membership Special Features
- Each member can have a personal welcome page, where you can make comments only for that member to see, and no one else.
- Each member can manage their own file respository if you want to offer that as a feature.
- Each member can contribute to a blog, or shared content, if you want.
- Each member can get VIP price for products, or up to 8 price groups, or get member group discounts as you like.
Caveats
- Other than WindCave, we don't manage monthly payment plans, because that process is best managed by payment providers. They may attempt a transaction multiple times until a subscriber has sufficient funds, or not. The timing of payments may predate expiry, occur on expiry, occur post dated. Payment plans may occur weekly, monthly, on a fixed day of the month, or otherwise configured between you, the customer and the payment provider.
- We manage "contract terms" of subscriptions. A contract term is the product purchase, and total price quoted. Customers need to manually action their renewals. You can choose to offer a forever membership if you like.
- It is very complex to consider all the permutations of business needs when a customer does not meet the terms of a payment plan. Have products/services already been delivered? Will you cancel their membership immediately, or offer a grace period? How many times will you attempt to chase payment? We believe those decisions are best made offline. You can manually update a member's status as you wish.
- You might like to use a payment provider like "Windcave" or "Stripe" or an accounting system like "Xero" to automatically bill your customers and collect payments on a regular basis. In this case, our system initiates signups, and delivers the actual service, but does not manage the ongoing subscription terms. This is optional.
Setup Instructions For Subscriptions / Repeat Orders
- Create and price your products ordinarily, as if they are a one off purchase. Imagine your business is allowing customers to setup a repeat order of their favourite organic foods. If you only have 1 product on offer, then that is all you have.
- Add repeat order options to your checkout process, in the shopping setup checkout customisation area in the CMS. This allows the customer to request repeat billing of any/all items they add to their cart. There is an option to prevent one off purchases...
- Setup Windcave or Paymark as a payment option, with automated billing options.
- Now test the process... Add the item(s) to your cart that you want to subscribe/repeat order. Checkout. Select the billing frequency. Upon completion of your first order, a new draft order is created, and will automatically close at the end of the billing frequency. A copy of every repeat order is sent to the customer, with payment occuring shortly after.
- Customers who want to cancel the subscription should login and cancel their next draft order, and this is how you cancel the subscription..