Structure of a Billing Plan
A Billing Plan is made up of conditions that define when and how much to charge a customer for an ongoing subscription, and is composed of a set of Billing Periods, each made up of Billing Cycles, with billing occurring at the start of each Cycle. Commerce Engine offers daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly billing periods. A billing plan can have several billing periods and differing numbers of cycles per schedule. It must have at least one billing period schedule defined. To create a subscription, it must have an associated billing plan.Multiple Billing Periods
For subscriptions with multiple billing periods, only the last billing period can have unlimited cycles. If you are using a billing plan to manage an installment payment plan that has a natural end, your final schedule should not be set to unlimited.Free Trial Periods
Free trial periods are a popular marketing tool to acquire new subscribers. Accordingly, Commerce Engine Billing Plans have a pre-defined option for free trials. When the first period is defined as a trial period, the pricing of the Product and Billing Plan are overridden in the subscription.Pricing Flexibility
Billing Plans can have a price associated with them or serve as a more generic billing schedule without a price. In this way, you can set the price on the product itself and not the billing plan and keep the building blocks of your product catalog to a minimum. It is important to note that if both the billing plan and the product are associated a price, the subscription will charge the sum of both these associated price points.Notifications and Grace Periods
You can define if and when a subscriber is notified before billing, by selecting how many days before billing to send a notification. This often helps avoid customer loss as the subscriber is aware of the upcoming charge. Also, a grace period can be applied per billing plan during which subscribers can stay active in the plan even if recurring payment transactions fail. Setting a grace period per billing plan overrides, for this billing plan only, the Reseller (Service Provider) default grace period setting.Early Termination Fee
Billing Plans can allow you define early termination fees to charge customers that do not meet the Minimum Commitment period of a subscription. Currently, this feature can be defined in the Commerce Engine API.Managing Billing Plans
The Billing Plan search results displays your billing plans by ID, Description, Status, Created Date, End Date, Currencies, Plan Repeats, and Billing Periods. You can search for billing plans by any of these key words or click the Show Filters button to refine your search. To keep a list of Billing Plans, you can export the Billing Plans to a csv file. Click the
Example Use Case
A Reseller (Service Provider) wants to offer exercise and fitness content. The product is set at 32 CAD. The Billing Plan offers an initial period of 30 days free trial and an additional billing period of a monthly subscription that continues with no expiration. In this example, the billing plan serves as a generic schedule and the product the customer is entitled to. The price is defined in the Product object instead of on the billing plan.