Version 4 introduces subscription based products.
With subscription services, the assumption is that subscriptions are intangibles, such as content/membership, as opposed to a physically shipped product.
In general, subscription based products work as follows:
- The store owner sets a recurring price and recurring interval on a product. (See Adding and Editing Products)
- The customer buys the product, backend records are created so that the shopper is billed by the proper amount/interval
- Subscriptions can be seen on the admin side under the Orders section (the billing records, so to speak)
- On the catalog side, shoppers can see their subscriptions under My Account-->View My Subscriptions.
When the billing process runs against the subscriptions, two things happen:
- *all* payments are logged in the Billing Log (Tools-> Log Viewer)
- *successful* payments appear in the Orders list as a new order (receipt)
Correct Payment Modules Required
NOTE: to make this work, the store owner *must* have a credit card payment module that supports "unattended" transactions.
- Subscriptions will not work with checks/cod/simple validation
- Supported payment modules are: Verisign Payflow Pro - Linkpoint (not basic)- Yourpay - Protx VSP Direct (UK module only)
If the store owner sets up recurring pricing for a product but they don't have one of these modules enabled, they will see an error at the top of the "Update Catalog" page that alerts them to this (the product tree page).