IgnitionDeck Commerce | Managing Subscriptions
IgnitionDeck Commerce subscriptions enable you to repeatedly charge a purchaser’s credit card at a regular time interval which you specify. This allows you to easily use subscription business models on your web site.
Recurring payments are supported through Paypal (Adaptive) and Stripe.
Subscription content will continue to be available to customers as long as they remain on the associated payment plan and their card information remains valid. You can cancel subscriptions at any time through your respective gateway accounts, and privileges to the associated content will be automatically revoked at the end of the current subscription period.
Using Recurring Payments with Paypal
PayPal can automatically handle recurring payments with no additional setup required. It’s important to note, however, that your customers will need to have a PayPal account to use this payment type unless you’ve upgraded to PayPal’s “Enhanced Recurring Payments”.
When a user purchases a recurring product, they’ll be redirected to the Paypal website to confirm their subscription.
Creating a Payment Plan in Stripe
Stripe’s product for recurring payments is called Billing, and can be complicated to setup due to the number of advanced features it offers. When working with IgnitionDeck, you’ll want to pay specific attention to their instructions for setting up a service product and pricing plan.
Think of products as a parent that can contain multiple plans. For example, we could offer an IgnitionDeck product with an Echelon and an Enterprise plan.
Once you have created a product, you’ll create a plan, leaving the Stripe Plan Name field blank to allow Stripe to automatically generate one for you. Typically, it starts with price_ and ends with a string of random characters.
Next, select Recurring on the License Type menu, enter the name of the Stripe plan you wish to use, and make sure the time interval selected matched that of your plan*.
Once you’ve created a product with the appropriate details, you’re ready to sell the product and add subscribers to your subscription!
*Please note: Customers will always be charged according to the frequency of your plan set in Stripe, but IDC products only know to expire according to the duration you select inside of IDC. It’s important to make sure these match.
*Important: You must set up a webhook in Stripe in order for the subscription product to be assigned to the supporter’s account on your site. Please see Payment Gateways » Stripe
PWYW with Recurring Payments turned on is not possible with Stripe. If a customer changes their payment amount, Stripe will no longer be available as a payment gateway, so you will want to have at least one additional payment gateway activated. This is due to the fact that Stripe handles recurring payments based on a unique “Stripe Plan Name,” which has a set price assigned to it. One work-around for this is to have many incremental levels, like $1, $5, $10, $15 etc.
Limiting Subscriptions in IgnitionDeck Commerce.
Optionally, IgnitionDeck Commerce subscriptions can be set to be limited to a certain number of payments. For instance, a monthly subscription will result in a recurring monthly charge, but with the addition a 12 payment limit, the monthly payments will stop being processed in one year.
To do this, just check the box for “Limit Number of Payments,” fill in the “Number of Payments” field, and update your product.