Recurring billing for secure zone membership
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Contents |
Introduction
Charging subscribers on a periodical basis for accessing regularly updated high-value content within a secure zone can be achieved using the recurring billing feature. Recurring billing is integrated with secure zones allowing clients monetize their online presence for their high value content. It also performs as an automated system to collect membership dues online.
When implemented your customers simply register and pay for access to a secure area via your website. The system will process their payment and grant them access to the desired secure zone for a specific period of time during which the customer can login to the secure zone. The system will also automatically setup all the recurring bills so your customers are automatically charged at a certain interval to extend their access to the secure zone.
This feature can also be used as a billing system to automatically collect membership dues for clubs and associations who use the system to host their websites. Club/Association members can sign-up online with a credit card and have their card automatically debited whenever membership fees are due (e.g quarterly, half-yearly or yearly) and a membership invoice is sent to them via email.
Important: Not all payment gateways support recurring billing
Not all payment gateways support this feature. Your Payment Gateway must support recurring billing if you wish to create recurring orders to charge your customers periodically. For a list of the gateways which support this, see HERE
How to Implement Recurring Billing
Setting up recurring billing for a secure zone is a 4 step process. You'll need to
- Create a secure zone
- Define the Recurring Billing Details (such as price, and recurrence period)
- Create a sign-up form for members to subscribe and pay their first installment to access the secure zone
- Setup a login form to enable subscribers to return and login
Recurring Billing functionality is integrated with the Secure zone functionality, to use it you have to go to Websites>>Secure Zones
where you can click on a existing secure zone to add recurring billing to or you can create a new secure zone.
Step 1 - Creating a Secure Zone
Please refer to the Online Business Wiki article Secure zone for full details on how to create a secure zone. You'll need to make sure that the following checklist is ticked off for your Secure Zone for it to work well with Subscription memberships.
- Your subscribers who login to your secure zone land on the correct page within the zone
- That they can navigate within the secure zone i.e. the pages and content that have been added to the zone are linked to each other
- The correct pages have been added to the secure zone
Step 2 - Define the Recurring Billing Details
On the "Secure Zone Details" page that appears when you click on a Secure Zone or create a new one you'll see a tickbox labeled "Sell Membership Access to this Secure Zone". Tick this and the options for for the Recurring Billing Details will be shown.
- Choose the currency that you want to use to charge the membership subscription
- Enter the membership cost that will be charged each period
- Choose how frequently you want your members to be charged, there are period increments in the dropdown menu that range from daily to yearly.
Step 3 - Create a Membership Sign-Up Form
To be able to charge your subscription members on a regular basis you need to create a membership sign-up form to collect their details and charge them for the 1st period of usage. For every period of usage thereafter, the system will have automatically setup recurring orders to charge the initial credit card used and extend length of access for the user.
For a full reference on how to create webforms please refer to this Online Business Wiki Article Web Forms. For the purposes of this article we will focus on how to setup a simple recurring billing webform.
- Select the webform fields - The minimum requirement is to collect the customers details and email, their desired username and password, and their credit card details for processing and the verification code to increase the security of the transaction.
- Allow the subscribing member to choose which subscription plan they wish to sign up to by choosing the "Sell ongoing membership access to a secure zone" radio box in the "Choose Secure Zone to automatically subscribe and redirect customer to" option box. This will give the user a list of radio button options for signing up to a subscription membership plan on the webform. The options shown will depend on how many secure zones with different payment plans you have created for your site. Once the user chooses the plan, the form will auto-fill the amount to be deducted from the users credit card in the bottom of the form for submission.
Step 4 - Create a Login Form
You need to place a login box on the public area of your website (usually the homepage or a dedicated login page) so users can enter their username and passwords and access secure content when they return to the site.
To do this:
- Select a webpage from the WebPages menu (for example your homepage)
- Use the Module Manager to insert a Secure zone login box on your web page. Make sure you Save and Publish your webpage.
Recurring Billing - Customer Relationship Management
You can manage the recurring billing for your customers through the systems CRM by choosing a customer to view and then browsing their customer orders.
Choose 'Customer Orders' from the action box
Select a recurring order and go to edit mode for the order
Which brings up the recurring order screen:
Cancelling Memberships
If a customer wishes to cancel their membership, they will need to contact you and then you need to cancel their order manually through the system CRM. You can setup a membership cancellation form on your site to collect the cancelling customers details and send a notification to you. After you receive the notification you can go through the CRM to cancel the recurrence on their original order by changing the Recurring Status from "Enabled" to "Disabled" and change "Direct Debit" to None. You'll also need to unsubscribe them from secure zone membership shown below.
Manually Editing Secure Zone Access for Customers
To manage each customers subscription to a secure zone as well as their subscription billing, you'll have to go to Customers>>Manage Customer Subscriptions:
Which brings up the Secure Zone subscription tickboxes. You can use these to manually subscribe or unsubscribe users and change the expiry of their secure zone membership
What Happens If a Payment for a Recurring Order Fails?
If a payment fails you will receive a notification via email about the order that has failed. The system will not automatically cancel the recurring order leaving it up to the site administrator to follow-up with the customer to maintain the recurring order. If the customer wishes to cancel then you can follow the "Cancelling Memberships" process above to cancel their order.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. How many secure zones can I create for my website?
A. You can create an unlimited number of secure zones each with their own payment plans.
Q. Can I customize the invoice that is emailed to my customers?
A. You can customize the invoice that is emailed to customers by going to the Admin Menu (top right)->Customize System Emails
Q. Will my customers receive a new invoice for each recurring payment?
A. Every time a new order is created as a result of the recurring orders, a new invoice will be generated and sent to the customer.
Q. How many secure zones can my customers be subscribed to?
A. Each customer can be subscribed to any number of secure zones either through signing up through your website or being manually added by the site administrator through the system CRM.
Q. How does AVS work with recurring billing
A. By default a small number of payment gateways will require the customer's billing address to process payments. Most payment gateways will allow you to disable this option. If you however need this option turned on then you will need to ensure you capture billing address from customers. This will automatically be stored with an order and used for recurring bills. If you are in the US and using a payment gateway such as PayPal then you will need to use client-side validation to ensure address details are formatted correctly, for instance PayPal will only accept a 2-letter state code.
