Description
Subscription products are a great source of recurring revenue for our clients. The Scalefast platform allows you to easily add and configure subscription products in the Merchant Back Office to fit your individual business needs and the needs of your customers.
Adding a Subscription Product
Products are considered subscription products when they are associated with an order plan. Simply create a physical or digital product in the “Add Products” section of the back end and then you will be able to associate that product with an order plan in the order plan section.
Subscription products should be purchased by only those customers who are logged into their account. Customers must be able to access their subscriptions through their account in order to monitor and maintain their payment details and products.
If the subscription product is part of a tiered group, then you may associate it with the other products in the group by clicking the “Browse” button here. Please note that this can only be done after the original product is published.
Clicking the “Browse” button will open a window where you can search for and select the other tiered products associated with your product. Once you have selected all of the associated products, click the “Add” button to return to the product page.
When you return to the product page, you will see all the products that you have selected in the previous window as well as the product of the particular product page which you are on. You may drag and drop the products to place them in order from highest tier (at the top) to lowest tier (at the bottom). You may also remove any product from the list (except for the main product of that particular product page) by clicking on the red “X” to the right of the product. These changes will be saved to the product pages of all products in the list when the “Save” button is selected.
Adding and Managing Order Plans
Once you have added your subscription product to the back end, you must associate it with an order plan. In the “Subscriptions” section of the back end menu, choose “Manage Plans”.
To associate your subscription product with an existing order plan, choose an active order plan from the list below.
You may also create a new subscription order plan by selecting the “Add new Order Plan” button.
This will bring you to the order plan page where you can create and manage the:
- Order plan name
- Order plan description
- Territories where order plan is available
- Order plan status
Below that, in the “Product and Discount” section, you may designate the products that are associated with the order plan by providing one of the following:
- Category ID
- Feed ID
- Reference ID / SKU
- Internal ID / Product ID
Finally, in the “Renewals” section, you can set when and how often the subscription will renew.
If the subscription is set to renew monthly, by default it will renew on the same day every month. For example, a subscription that starts on October 4 will renew on the 4th of every month. Subscriptions started on a day that does not appear in all months will renew on the 1st of the following month. For example, a subscription started on January 29, 30 or 31 will renew on March 1.
If you prefer to have all subscriptions renew on the same date, you may set a specific day of the month and time for the renewal to take place. When this option is selected, if a customer starts a subscription on any day other than the renewal date, the first month’s subscription fee will be prorated based on the amount of days left in the renewal period.
Alternatively, you may choose to set the renewal period to a custom number of days. For example, if the renewal period is set to 15 days, then the first renewal order will occur 15 days after the start of the subscription. Renewal orders will continue every 15 days until the subscription is cancelled or the order plan is changed.
Your changes will be applied once the Save button is selected.
Please note that subscription renewal payments will not pass through Scalefast’s SAFE anti-fraud system unless the payment method for the subscription has been changed.
Within the Manage Plans view, you can search for plans specifically by Order Plan ID and Plan Name. For additional filters, switch the Filters to "On". From there, the results can be filtered by Creation Date, Status and Territory. Once you have input the parameters of the plans that you are searching for, click the Search button below.
If you would like to view all of the existing plans with no filters, leave each of the fields blank with the Filters switched off, and click Search.
After clicking the Search button, the plans will populate with columns of details below.
