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The billing plan governs the billing frequency and schedule as part of a subscription purchase. It allows you to configure the payment structures required to accommodate your marketing needs for one or multiple products by letting you control how often to bill a customer. A billing plan is composed of a set of billing periods, each with associated billing cycles, with billing occurring at the start of each cycle. Commerce Engine offers daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly billing cycles. You can define how many billing cycles a billing period includes up to unlimited. If a billing plan includes several billing periods, only the final billing period can be defined as unlimited, meaning for that period no expiration date was defined. A billing plan must include at least one billing period. To create a subscription, it must include one billing plan. 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. For example, a billing plan can be defined with an initial period of 7 days as a free trial and an additional billing period of a monthly billing frequency with no set expiration date. A billing plan is associated with supported currencies and in that way defines where it can be offered. It is possible to set a price on the billing plan if required. However, the best practice approach is to use the billing plan as the subscription’s billing scheduling in a generic manner so it can be reused for different products. Define the price on the product itself, and not the billing plan, to 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 with a price, the subscription will charge the sum of both of these associated price points. The billing plan also lets you set commitment periods for the subscription. If the subscription is canceled early, before the commitment period is met, early termination fees can be defined. You can also define subscriber communication policy, whether and when subscribers are notified before billing, by selecting how many days before billing to send a customer notification. This often helps avoid customer loss as subscribers are 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 a recurring payment attempt fails. This grace period, will take precedence over the defined Reseller (Service Provider) grace period.

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Billing Plan Highlights

Commerce Engine billing plan highlights include:
  • Free trial billing periods and discount periods.
  • Recurring or non-recurring billing.
  • Flexible grace periods, anniversary dates, terms, and pricing.
  • Single- and multi-tiered pricing.
  • Support for multiple offer periods, recurring billing, and most global currencies.
  • Support for early termination fees.
Parent topic:Product Catalog