Recurring billing provides you with the opportunity to charge your customer's credit card a pre-determined amount at pre-defined periods of time. The recurring payments feature is very useful if you provide web hosting services, different kinds of membership or subscription, if you own clubs or just want your customers to make constant payments on a recurring basis.
In order to activate the recurring payments, please go to Administration > Products > Edit Product and choose the Recurring tab. Then tick off the 'Activate Recurring Payments' checkbox and fill the following fields:
Recurring Period field allows you to select the preferred period you want your recurring payments be made. For example, if you enter 1 and select ‘month’ in the ‘Recurring Period’ it means that your customers will have to make recurring payments once in a month. You are welcome to choose daily, weekly, monthly or early payments.
In the Payments Total field please enter the total number of instalments which are to be made for this product.
Payments Start End and Payments End Date are the dates when the first and the last payment are to be done. You can enter the dates manually or choose the dates from the available calendar.
When finished, click the Update button.
The next step is to switch on the recurring method. For this go to Administration > Orders > Payment Systems and select the payment system you want to use for recurring payment. By default, the recurring method is ticked off as a non allowed method. To make it active you are to select from two available options: ‘Automatically create order for next payment’ or ‘Automatically create and bill recurring orders’. Note that a second option can be only used for advanced payment systems, like Authorize.net, LinkPoint API, etc.
You may also want to attune the recurring payments to your needs. This can be done by clicking on the Recurring Settings.
The General Tab gives you the possibility to set the following parameters:
Select the status for new recurring orders. The statuses can be added via Administration > Orders > Orders Statuses.
Indicate the number of attempts after which the orders will be cancelled in case of failure. Enter the necessary number in the appropriate field.
In the ’Next attempt if order failed’ field please specify appropriate number of days for the next attempt to transfer money.
From version 3.4.5 you have the possibility to save product options, shipping costs and custom fields for recurring orders. Tick off the options you need as per the above image.
’On creation’, ‘On success’, ‘On Pending’, ‘On failure’, tabs allow you to notify customers or administrators about the status of their recurring payments. You have the option to choose between e-mail and sms notifications. For more information on how to set the notifications, please refer to see section 5.4.2.2 and see section 4.1.1
These are the main settings. To test the recurring payments make all the aforementioned settings and purchase a product. Then go to Orders > Sales Orders and click the Recurring Orders link. If you set the dates of instalments correctly then you will receive the notice, like:
1 recurring orders were added.
In case the dates are not set correctly the notice you receive will be:
1 recurring orders are available at present time.
Automatic configuration of recurring payments
If you do not want to bother yourself with the manual processing of recurring payments you can make the automatic configuration for recurring payments. For this you are to add an appropriate command in you crontab -e file which contains the schedule of cron entries to be run at specified times.
The command can be something like:
0 6 * * * /path/to/php -f /home/rg1/public_html/admin/admin_orders_recurring.php -l ted -p readfast
You can ask your system administrator or your hosting provider about the correct path to your php interpetator on your server.
When the command is added, save it in your cron file and the script will run at the time you specified in the crontab file.
|
20. Recurring Payments
Recurring billing provides you with the opportunity to charge your customer's credit card a pre-determined amount at pre-defined periods of time. The recurring payments feature is very useful if you provide web hosting services, different kinds of membership or subscription, if you own clubs or just want your customers to make constant payments on a recurring basis.
