Overview:
In this article, you will learn how you can create a plan to charge your customers upfront for future deliveries, and get recurring shipments of $0 for remaining deliveries.
Prepaid subscriptions give subscribers the option to pay for all of their shipments upfront. For example: If a subscriber buys a monthly subscription, and chooses the quarterly payment option, they will pay for 3 months worth of orders on their 1st month's order/delivery, and then will have have 2 $0 shipments for month 2 and month 3.
Use Case:
Let's say you have a product in Shopify that costs $10, and you offer this product on monthly subscriptions; you would now to like to charge customers upfront for 3 months - $10*3 = $30.
Step 1:
We need to create a product in Shopify with a base price of $30.
Step 2:
Create a plan in Appstle with the following configuration:
Plan Type (Pay As you Go)
Order Frequency 1 Month
Max Number of orders 3
Step 3: Click to Save the plan.
Step 4: Go back to Subscription Plans and select Loyalty.
Step 5: Click the button to configure loyalty, then set an initial discount of 0%.
Step 6: Click Add for 3 additional fields (After Billing Cycle(s), Offer, and Discount Type). Type '1' into the first, then 'Percent Off (%)' into the second, and finally, type '100' into the third.
Step 7: Click to save.
The above configuration will charge customers $30 (for 3 months of the product) in the first order/delivery. The system will then place 2 more orders for the next 2 months, at $0 (since the customers have already paid for their deliveries).
The difference between regular prepaid billing, and the above setup of using pay as you go for upfront billing, is as follows:
For the regular prepaid plan type, customers get charged upfront for all future deliveries, but on Shopify, you will not receive a recurring order for those deliveries every month.
With the 'Pay as you Go' system, when properly used, you can charge upfront for future deliveries, while also receiving the recurring order for each delivery.
If you have any questions about this use case 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.