Subscriptions

Subscriptions is an X-Cart module that allows you to use recurring billing. If your store has to deal with regularly scheduled payments (such as membership dues or installment payments), this module can take a load of work off the shoulders of the staff involved with processing them.

With Subscriptions, your customers' accounts can be charged automatically. You specify, which products in your store should be available by subscription, and set up a recurring billing plan for each of these products. A recurring billing plan includes information about the amount and frequency to be charged to a customer's credit card.

Note: if you want to use recurring billing, make sure you disable the anonymous checkout option, otherwise the billing cannot be performed as no credit card data will be stored in the anonymous customer's profile.

When customers order a subscription product, they consent to allow your store take payments from their account at regular periods of time. Then, a special script, which can be launched either manually or automatically, uses the billing information contained in the customers' profiles to charge an appropriate amount to their credit cards. An optional e-mail can be sent to the orders department of your store every time a customer's account is charged to help you monitor your recurring billing transactions.

In any case, using the module reduces processing time and administrative hassle, reduces risk of human error from manual processing and provides you better control over your cash flow.

Important: Please be aware that if you want your store to be able to perform periodic billing transactions with Subscriptions module, the values of the $store_cc and $store_cvv2 variables in config.php must be set to ‘true’.

If you are an X-Cart GOLD administrator/provider or an X-Cart PRO administrator:

▪	You can enable/disable Subscriptions module and adjust its configuration settings (Check out Enabling and Configuring 'Subscriptions').

▪	You can perform all operations regarding subscription management in your store: search for existing subscriptions, view the details of subscription orders, change future pay dates, activate/disable/cancel subscriptions, etc (Study Managing Subscriptions).

▪	You can manually charge accounts of customers signed up for a recurring billing plan or set up an external application that will charge these accounts automatically (See Running admin/pay_subscriptions.php).

▪	You can specify, which products you would like to be paid for on a recurring basis and set up recurring billing plans for these products (See Adjusting Setup Fees and Recurring Billing Plans).