Overview
While creating a subscription plan, you will have the option to select from different subscription plan types in your store's merchant portal.
Currently, Appstle offers 3 different plan types:
1. Pay As You Go (Auto-renew)
2. Prepaid One-Time
3. Prepaid Auto-Renew
What is the difference between them?
1. Pay As You Go (Auto-renew)
With the 'pay-as-you-go' plan, your customers will be charged at regular intervals, as per the order frequency and interval of their subscription.
For instance, if you are offering a monthly subscription option to your customers in which products are delivered every month, and you choose the 'Pay As You Go' option, your customers will be billed once a month for just the value of the order delivered that month. The customer will be automatically billed, until they, or you, the merchant, cancel the subscription.
2. Prepaid One-Time
With the prepaid one-time plan type, you can charge your customers an upfront payment for multiple upcoming orders that are a part of the subscription.
In the below image, we see that the Billing Period is 12, and the Fulfillment Frequency is 1 month. This means that the customer will be charged for 12 months of orders upfront. They will be pre-paying for 12 deliveries in advance. The payment will automatically create an order with 12 fulfilments in your Shopify's orders section.
The prepaid plan will only charge once, after which only the fulfillments are to be completed, and then the subscription terminates.
3. Prepaid Auto-Renew
Prepaid Auto-Renew plan is quite similar to the Prepaid One-time plan. However here, you can enable the prepaid plan to continue charging the customer upfront based on the configuration you define.
In the below configuration, the customer will be charged every 12 months for 12 months of orders, so there will be 12 fulfillments created in the order in your Shopify Admin. This subscription will not terminate after the first payment upfront, and will instead continue until canceled, like the Pay-as-you-go plan.
If you have any questions about Plan types, or are looking for more features, you can reach out to us at subscription-support@appstle.com. Our 24x7x365 available experts will be happy to assist you further.