Payment Plans Overview
Payment plans allow customers to be billed on a recurring basis, either indefinitely, or for a specified number of payments/installments. Some examples of the types of situations this is designed to support includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- A customer purchases a software license, which is only licensed to operate for one month. An automatic, recurring payment may extend the license to operate for another month after successfully billing the customer.
- A customer purchases a software license which does not expire, but has an annual maintenance or support plan associated with it. The customer may be automatically billed after one year to extend his or her's eligibility for upgrades and/or technical support.
- A customer may be allowed to purchase a $90 product for 3 monthly installments of $30. In this case, an initial payment of $30 is made, and two automatic, recurring payments of $30 will be processed 30 and 60 days after initial purchase.
Payment plans are supported through SOLO Server's integrated eCommerce. We recommend using PayPal's PayFlow Pro payment gateway:
Payment Plans are not compatible with the PayPal Payments Standard and WorldPay payment gateways. In addition, if using Authorize.NET, you must store full credit card information in order to use the payment plan feature. PayPal's PayFlow Pro supports payment plans, and supports resubmitting a prior Transaction ID for recurring payments, and thus doesn't require storing the full credit card information.
Payment Plan Process
Regardless of the scenario, an initial purchase of a Product Option must be made, and that Product Option must be configured with a Payment Plan. A new Payment Plan instance is created for each new order for that Product Option. The following list outlines the payment plan process:
- Customer purchases a Product Option associated with a payment plan
- During order processing:
- A new Stored Payment is created for the customer with the payment details.
- A new payment plan instance is created for the customer with the payment plan details and linked to the new stored payment.
- A new license is created for the customer and linked to the payment plan instance.
- The customer is then regularly billed automatically based on the payment plan instance settings. Optional billing reminder emails can also be sent prior to the actual billing taking place. Customers can log into the Customer License Portal to update their payment information or cancel their subscription.
- The default behavior of the payment plan is defined, but you are allowed to administer each payment plan instance for each unique order processed. You can manually update the fields of a payment plan instance, but there is not a built-in feature to automatically update a payment plan instance based on changes to an existing license. Contact us if you have any questions about updating a payment plan instance.
Now that you have a high-level understanding of how payment plans work, the next step is learning how to setup a payment plan.
If you are using Instant Protection PLUS 3, we also have a tutorial on setting up a recurring subscription.