Recurring Billing

From Online Business Wiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 How the invoicing works 3 Supported Payment Gateways 4 Payment Gateway Setup 4.1 Paypal Website Payments Pro 4.2 eWay 4.3 Authorize.net 4.4 SagePay/Protx

Introduction

The system is capable of recurring billing for your clients.

An example of how this works is when a customer purchases a product with a monthly cycle type, the system will setup an order which recurs every month and automatically uses the customer's credit card details to process subsequent payments. If a customer purchases products with different Cycle Types then the system will create a recurring order for each cycle.

For some examples of use for recurring billing, see these articles -

• Recurring billing for secure_zone membership
• Selling Recurring Products
• Creating Recurring Orders

The Payment gateway you are using must support this feature, and for each payment gateway there is some setup required. Additionally, the payment gateway may pass on additional charges to use this service.

How the invoicing works

To explain how the recurring invoicing works for your customers, consider a case where you have an order with an invoice date of 1/Sep/09 and it's set on monthly recurring.

Recurring orders are always recurred 14 days before the next invoice date. So on the 16/Sep/09, the next invoice will be created which will have a 1/Oct/09 invoice date.

When it comes to charging an invoice, the timing of this is dictated by the field Direct Debit Days (go to any order and click on Recurrance/Direct Debit to see this field). A value of 0 means the invoice is charged on the actual invoice date. So your recurring order that is generated on 16/Sep (with an invoice date of 1/Oct) will be charged on 1/Oct. A value of 5 for this field, will charge this invoice 5 days after the invoice date, i.e. 6/Oct.

You can disable invoices being sent to customers when an order is automatically recurred. You cannot change the timing in which invoices will get emailed to customers other than turn it on or off for when orders are recurred.

Please contact us if you wish to disable the emailing of invoices for recurred orders.

Supported Payment Gateways

For a current list of all gateways, showing those supporting this feature, see the table HERE

Payment Gateway Setup

Paypal Website Payments Pro

There is no additional setup required for this gatewway - it is enabled for Recurring billing by default

eWay

To use Recurring Billing with the eWay payment Gateway, you need to a) enable the Rebill feature in the eWay backend and b) Enter your username and password in your Online Business Admin Console. Follow these steps:

Enabling The Rebill Feature:

1. Select this option from the main menu. 2. Activate the feature.

Entering your Username / Password

1. Navigate to eCommerce > Payment Gateways

2. Enter your eWay username and password (the same ones you use to login to your eWay account)

3. Make sure you Save your changes

Note: If all of the above steps are not completed, Recurring Billing will not function.

Authorize.net

Authorize.net uses the 'Customer Information Manager' feature to accept recurring orders / payments. They currently charge a monthly fee for this service.

You can find details about this on the main login page - And enable it at the bottom of the information page -

You will then need to follow the steps given to you by Authorize.net to activate this feature.

SagePay/Protx

This gateway will soon be able to accept recurring orders.

More details to follow once operating.