Setting up subscriptions with recurrent billing

To start using subscriptions with recurrent billing, there are a few technical and administrative steps to take.

Introduction

Prerequisites

• An existing credit card payment gateway with card tokenization support. Supported gateways are: MasterCard (MPGS), Stripe, PayPal, TAP (Gulf countries).
• A clear subscription product offering. Refer to your account manager for help defining your monetization strategy.
• An existing working e-comerce integration with WhiteBeard News Suite.

Limitations

• Recurrent billing is not always compatible with bank redirect payments (such as iDeal). Some payment gateways can support it by automatically converting compatible bank redirect payments to a bank debit or SEPA Debit. For more information, refer to your payment gateway's documentation. Suggested link: Stripe.

Terminology

• Pricing tier or Product item refers to a variation of your product. For example, a product can be a T-Shirt and its product items will be Small, Medium, and Large. Each can have its own price and specifications. In a subscription store, a product can be a Basic subscription and the product items can be Monthly and Yearly.
• Recurrent product is a product item that is paid on a regular preset basis, for example, every 30 days.
• Subscription refers to an visitor's specific subscription tied to a specific recurrent product.
• Subscription group is a grouping of many recurrent products and pricing tiers under a single subscription offering. This is used for the purpose of access permissions, reporting, and renewal periods calculation. For example, you can have two subscription groups (Basic and Premium) and many pricing tiers for each of them.

Start using subscriptions

To start using subscriptions, you must complete all of the below steps.

1. Communicate with your account manager on your choice of payment gateway and renewal rules.
2. Configure your subscription groups from E-Commerce -> Settings.
3. Create new recurrent products. Refer to "Adding a pricing tier" in the Add a product guide. For testing, you are advised to set the subscription time to 1 day.
4. Send your e-mail templates to WhiteBeard.
5. Implement card tokenization functionalities using your payment gateway's API. You will need to create an "Add payment method" page on your frontend to capture the visitor's payment method and communicate it to WhiteBeard News Suite.
6. Test an initial payment.
7. Send an e-mail to support@whitebeard.me to enable nightly renewal.
8. Wait for the next renewal to happen.
9. Review any issues flagged by WhiteBeard Support or the system itself such as processing errors, payment errors, or renewal failures.

Renewal process and rules

By default, WhiteBeard News Suite will process payments as described below. All bold phrases are configurable elements which you might want to fine-tune to your business needs.

1. At 00:00 (server time) every day, auto renewal process starts.
2. Due subscriptions are subscriptions with "next renewal" that evaluates to today, 7 days ago, and 14 days ago between 00:00 and 23:59.
3. Multiple subscriptions due the same day for the same user are grouped into a single payment. Optionally, you can request to have them in separate payments.
4. The product items connected to each subscription are added into the cart.
5. If the payment is successful, each product item's renewal action is applied.
6. The typical confirmation e-mail is sent to the user.
7. A purchase notification is sent to your contact e-mail.
8. In case of failure, your contact e-mail and WhiteBeard support will receive an e-mail for investigation. Users that expire today will typically have until 23:59 of the same day for their subscription to expire, providing enough time for ticket investigation.

A log is kept containing the list of subscriptions that were processed every day. You may request a copy of this log file if needed from our support team.