With Ongiong's Custom Fulfilment Schedule feature, you can create a prepaid yearly subscription plan and choose the dates for when the product will be delivered throughout the year.
The Ongoing custom Fulfillment schedule feature allows you to:
choose exact shipping dates for when you want to ship out your product
Automatically creates these orders based on the dates you choose
An automatic email is sent out to welcome the customer
An automatic email is sent out for renewals to alert customers that billing will occur soon
Automatic yearly ongoing automatic recurring billing
Ongoing powers your product page with recurring billing
Ongoing gives customers access to a "customer portal" where they can pause or cancel, update payment info, change the shipping address, etc.
HOW IT WORKS
When setting up custom fulfillment dates, the first order will go out immediately, and then the subsequent fulfillment dates will be scheduled according to your fulfillment date selections.
Example scheduled fulfillment dates:
- March 6th
- August 6th
- September 6th
- December 6th
If a customer subscribes to the annual prepaid plan on January 15th the following fulfillments would be scheduled:
January 15th
March 6th
August 6th
September 6th
The next billing date would be scheduled before the December 6th delivery date.
The number of days can be configured by the merchant, for example, 10 days before.
In this example, the next billing date would be November 26th, 10 days before the December 6th scheduled fulfillment date.
In this way, the customer will be paying for their one year subscription to renew in order to receive the December 6th package. They won’t miss any packages or need to skip a fulfillment.
An email notification for the customer will be sent automatically a certain number of days before the next billing date (defaulted to 10)
In this example, Ongoing would send an email automatically on November 16th to the customer. The purpose of the email would be to inform the customer that a new charge attempt will automatically occur on the specified day.
There will be a link to the customer portal where they can cancel or pause their subscription. This can help to reduce charge-backs and refunds and can help to increase customer loyalty.
This email content is configurable by the merchant and will be able to be turned off or on using the merchant admin interface. Ongoing --> Settings --> Emails
Example continued...
January 15th - Welcome email (you can customize this email to state all of their scheduled delivery dates for the year)
November 16th - Email notification "Your Subscription Will Renew Soon" (customer can cancel or pause)
November 26th - Next billing date (annual cycle renews automatically)
December 6th - Customer receives their package (1st shipment for the new annual cycle, you can also think of this as the 5th shipment)
Note: After the first round of shipments occurs, it's like a loop and a new loop of custom fulfillments will occur, and the products will be shipped out according to dates chosen by the merchant. Although the first fulfillment will be scheduled for immediate fulfillment like a normal order, it will transition to the selected fulfillment schedule.
Note for Magazine Companies: Usually, 0 cut-off days works best. That means no shipments are skipped. Let's say the next fulfillment date is September 6th, and someone ordered on September 1st. An order would get generated immediately, so you can send out the last issue to them, Then, when September 6th comes around, you can then send them the new issue. This is the most common setup with yearly magazine prepaid subscriptions.
