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Subscription Prices

Subscriptions are a great idea if you're selling a product or membership that requires regular billing. We've seen Simplero users offer their customers exclusive paid email lists, courses, membership sites, monthly events, the list goes on! Truly whatever you'd like to attach to a subscription price point, Simplero can help make that happen.

Adding a Subscription Price

With a Subscription, they buy access for a defined period of time. This is like paying rent. You don't own the apartment, you just get to have it for a while, typically a month at a time, so long as you keep paying.

  1. Select Products from your Simplero Dashboard
  2. From the Products tab, select the product you want to offer the subscription price 
  3. Select the Prices tab
  4. Add a subscription price by clicking the white "Add a list price" button on the left-hand side under the List Prices or the blue + Add a price button in the upper right corner

    Add_a_price_button
  5. Complete all relevant fields for the subscription price such as Name, Type of price, Amounts, etc.

    Price_creation_screen
  6. In the Type of price section, select the Subscription option

    Subscription_type_of_price
  7. Insert the amount of time your participant will have access for after paying this amount in the field titled "How long does this give access for"

    Subscription_type_price_settings
  8. In the Subscription settings section, choose the Renewal option

    Subscription_type_price_settings

    Forced vs Optional is whether this is something your customers can control, or just you. 

    With Auto-renew ON, forced, your customers cannot turn auto-renewal off. So if they want to cancel, their cancellation is going to be immediate, not to the end of the period they've paid for.

    With Auto-renew ON, optional, your customers can choose to turn auto-renew off, in which case their subscription will remain active till the end of the period, and then Expire automatically. No more charges, no more access.

    With Auto-renew OFF, optional, the subscription will by default NOT renew, but your customers can override this and have it renew anyway.

    With Auto-renew OFF, forced, the subscription will always expire at the end of the first period unless you as an admin overrides it and turns auto-renewal on for that particular purchase.

  9. If applicable complete the field titled "Minimum commitment". This is used if you want them to commit to a 1-year subscription for example. It will prevent them from being able to cancel before 1 calendar year is up. After that, it will continue to renew per your settings but they will be able to cancel at any time.
  10. Complete any other relevant fields such as campaign availability, number of subscriptions available, or restrictions such as having to be on a list or another product first. 
  11. Ideally, you will have a payment processor that can process automatic charges.  PayPal cannot so if you have PayPal enabled and you leave the price to 'unrestricted' payment processors, then people will be able to pay via PayPal and they will receive invoices for future subscription payments. If you want to require purchasers to to use a processor that can process automatic charges then set the price to 'automatic charge only'

Image 2018-11-01 at 10.13.52 AM.png

Click the Create price button


How to Setup a Subscription with a Fixed Start-Date

Sometimes when offering a new paid membership or subscription, you want to let people sign up now, but not charge them until some fixed date in the future, because all the content isn't going to be available until then. Or just as a promo.

Simplero's subscription prices don't have that feature, but here's what you can do instead.

You can create the subscription with two periods.

  1. The first has $0 as the amount or whatever amount you want them to pay upon purchase, and the duration can be set to e.g. 14 days or however many days until you want them to have the initial charge
  2. The second period will be the actual subscription price, so let's just say it's 30 days for $97.

As each new customers signs up, you can manually go in and change the date for "Period ends at" on their purchase to the date you want their next charge to be paid at.

Yes, this is a little bit of manual work, but it's simple and easy to do (as well as having an assistant to do it).

If you have many new subscribers each day, you can also simply change the price every day, so the number of days for the first period is the number of days until you want the subscription payments to start.


To change a subscription renewal to a different price point

If you would like to move an existing customer to a higher or lower level of a subscription, you can do the following.

  1. Select Products from your Simplero Dashboard
  2. Select the Purchases tab
  3. Locate and select the customer name
  4. Scroll down to the Charges & Payment box
  5. In this box you will see a line of texts labeled "PERIOD ENDS", "AUTO-RENEW" and "PRICE"
  6. Select the Subscription hyperlink and choose the new renewal rate from your list of price options for that product. 

    Change_subscription_renewal_date


If you change an existing subscription price, the new price will apply to all existing purchasers of that subscription.  The new price will take effect on their next subscription renewal date. 

If you do not want this to happen, you can duplicate the old price and then disable it.  Existing purchasers will continue to renew at the old, disabled, price.  You can then create and enable a new price to sell to new purchasers. 


What happens when a customer cancels? and how do they do that?

Depending on the settings you selected for your product, when a customer cancels a subscription they will receive a receipt for that cancellation via email. Also, whoever's listed to receive notifications on that product will receive a notification email with a subject that begins with "[Unrenewed purchase]"

Per the terms of your product's settings, a customer can cancel their subscription by:
  • clicking on "My Account" in their membership site (or visiting http://simplero.com/purchases) then selecting "My Subscriptions" and then "Manage Payment"

Subscription Changes

This option is only available when there is more than one subscription price and each of them gives access for a different period of time.

The change of subscription is executed immediately by cancelling the current purchase and generating a new purchase under the new price. 

Important notes to take into account:

  • When the current purchase gets cancelled, a prorated amount for the time left on the active subscription is stored as credit and applied on the new purchase.
  • This credit cannot be transferred to a third purchase and can only be refunded via the original purchase.

This is how it looks at the user end:

Last updated 18 Jan 2021.
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