Billing Plan Lifecycle

Follow this general Billing Plan lifecycle:

  1. Ensure you've prepared Billing plans related objects such as Season Sets or Tokens.
  2. Plan whether the billing plan is a generic scheduling to be used for several products or specific to a product.
  3. Create new or duplicate an existing Billing Plan
  4. Enter the relevant Billing Plan details, make sure to enter unique IDs .
  5. Select whether the Billing plan includes Pricing.
    Tip: Subscribe Best Practice is to define prices on the Product itself . The Billing Plan can also include a price but this then limits its flexibility and re-use for several products. If both the Product and Billing Plan include a price as part of a Subscription, the customer is charged the sum of those prices.
  6. Define the Billing Periods and Billing cycles.
    Tip: If the billing plan will be used as part of a rolling promotion campaign spanning multiple billing periods, note that the billing periods must be homogeneous. You cannot offer a rolling campaign if the Billing Plan has varied term lengths. Free trial periods are ignored.
  7. Consider whether a specialized grace period is required for the billing plan. You can override the general merchant configured grace period per a specific billing plan. For more details, see Billing Plan Details Pane.
  8. If you need to separate the periodic billing from entitlements and seasonality, use the Advanced behavior parameters. For more details, see Billing Plan Advanced Behavior Pane.
  9. Save the Billing Plan. The Billing Plan is saved as part of your Product Catalog.
  10. Activate the Billing Plan when you are ready.
  11. When a subscription is purchased, make sure to pass all the relevant Billing Plan details to Subscribe.
  12. You can edit the Billing Plan as long as it has not been used as part of a subscription. Once the billing plan is used by a subscription, only general details can be updated such as description. For the Billing Periods, only the price per cycle field may be edited. It is important to understand that any changes will impact all subscriptions (existing and new) of the billing plan.
    Tip:

    Subscribe Best Practice is not to edit an existing billing Plan, which is associated to subscriptions. It is recommended that an alternative Billing Plan be created and subscriptions should then be modified to use it instead.

  13. To keep a list of Billing Plans, you can export the Billing Plans to a csv file. Click the Download button and select whether to download the current displayed results only (by default, 10 to a page) or the full result list.
  14. Track the Billing Plan active and passive churn for a given period using the Churn Report available as part of the Insights menu.
  15. Track the effectiveness of free trial periods in a billing plan and see whether subscribers converted to paid subscriptions by using the Trial Performance Report available as part of the Insights Menu.

  16. Track the subscriptions renewal rate by Billing Plan for a given period including Expected Renewals, Successful Renewals,and Scheduled or Pending Retries by using the Renewal Performance Report available as part of the Insights menu.

  17. A billing plan can be disabled. When disabled, the billing plan will no longer appear in the catalog for new subscriptions. However, existing subscriptions associated with the billing plan will continue uninterrupted.