Subscriptions and subscription rules
Digital articles and services can be sold as a subscription. What a subscription does – term, billing, renewal – you set in a subscription rule. A subscription always needs a customer account.
Subscription rules
Under Consho setup → Subscription rules:
| Minimum term | in months or years. |
|---|---|
| Billing interval (months) | 0 = one payment for the whole term; the interval must divide the term without remainder. |
| At the end of the minimum term | ends · renews for the full minimum term (recommended for business customers only) · continues, cancellable at any time with at most 28 days' notice (monthly payment only). |
| Notice period, Reminder | the reminder goes out before the notice period begins. |
| Grace period (days) | after it, access is suspended until payment arrives. |
| Pause (months per contract year) | how much the customer may pause by themselves. |
| Customer groups | empty: every customer with an account. |
At the product you tick “Subscription” and choose the subscription rules. The amounts are in the prices under Sold as – one per subscription rule, the amount applies per payment.
Follow-up orders
For every payment Consho creates a follow-up order. With the core alone it goes “On account” – for that the shop needs a payment method of this type. It is only charged if a payment module holds a mandate; if the mandate is gone, the follow-up order goes “On account” again. If the provider gives no answer to a charge, the follow-up order keeps its payment method and waits up to 7 days for the provider's notification, because the money may have been taken all the same; only then does it go “On account”. The mail “Your invoice for subscription …” on account names the payment term, the bank details and the reference – and says when the charge did not go through. Limits and fees of the payment method do not apply to follow-up orders.
Subscriptions in the back end
Under Consho → Subscriptions you find all subscriptions – read-only – first the Status as an eye, green while the subscription is active, grey otherwise, with the state (active, suspended, paused, ended) as tooltip; then subscription number, customer, product, subscription rule and the dates. From there you pause a subscription, also beyond the allowance up to one year, open the purchase order and, under History, the cancellations and pauses of the subscription, newest first.
On the website
The My subscriptions element shows the customer their subscriptions with their state; there they pause in whole periods from the next one on, and the term moves accordingly. There are mails for the invoice, when a subscription is on hold, before the end of the minimum term and for the pause. An hourly cron bills, reminds and ends.
Findings
- No “On account” payment method (warning): without it no follow-up order is created.
- The payment method of a mandate is gone (warning): follow-up orders go “On account”.
- No price with “Sold as” (warning) and no way to register (warning).
- Only subscription rules with customer groups (note): the product appears in no list.
- Automatic renewal open to consumers (note), suspended subscriptions (note) and subscription customer in another country (warning).
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