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Handling Free Trials and Upgrades

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dror

15 Dec, 2011 11:34 PM

We'd like to offer our customers an initial free trial where they don't need to provide a credit card. When the free trial has ended they can enter their credit card info and be charged or downgraded to a free account. So I did the following:

• Created a "Free" and "Premium" accounts.

• Set the Premium account to have a 14 days free trial.

• Unchecked "Require payment method on paid subscriptions" in Settings.

• When a customer signs up with us I automatically subscribe them to the "Premium" account.

All of the above works correctly.

So then I experimented with upgrades and downgrades and ran into the first issue. When I send a customer to the hosted page if they upgrade from Free to Premium, they are not asked for a credit card since they are given the 14 days trial. I only want people to get the 14 days trial when we sign them through the API, not when they go to the hosted page. I worked around that by having a Trial account that has 14 days free and a Premimum that doesn't but that's not how I'd like to really do it.

For that matter, I probably don't want them to choose the plan on the hosted page. I want them to choose the plan on our pages and then just enter their Credit Card info on the hosted page. So I'd like to have a hosted page where they can enter a credit card and not choose the plan. Is that possible?

Also, when entering the credit card info, I'd like to popup an iframe on our pages so that the customer doesn't feel like they're leaving our site. The page is going to be using SSL with our cert. Any issues with that?

1. 1 Posted by dror on 15 Dec, 2011 11:55 PM

   

   Found the "Disallow pricing plan change on update page when plan code parameter is passed in" in the Hosting page Settings, which takes care of my second question.

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2. Support Staff 2 Posted by Marc Guyer on 16 Dec, 2011 02:48 PM

   

   Hi Dror -- Since you're exclusively creating trial accounts using the API, you might consider setting up the pricing plan to bill on signup by default. Using the API to create the customer on that plan, you can also pass in the initialBillDate parameter to achieve the trail period. Then, if someone signs up for the plan via hosted pages, they will not receive the trial.

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3. 3 Posted by dror on 16 Dec, 2011 07:58 PM

   

   Hi Marc,

   Yes, that sounds like it'll solve the free trial problem. How about this question:

   Also, when entering the credit card info, I'd like to popup an iframe on our pages so that the customer doesn't feel like they're leaving our site. The page is going to be using SSL with our cert. Any issues with that?

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4. Support Staff 4 Posted by Marc Guyer on 16 Dec, 2011 09:42 PM

   

   There shouldn't be any issues with that but it's possible that some browsers, depending on security settings, will complain about a cross-domain ssl iframe. There are others doing this and we haven't heard any complaints. Serving your page over ssl is important so the whole page is ssl. It sounds like you already know that...

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5. 5 Posted by dror on 16 Dec, 2011 11:43 PM

   

   Great, that's what I wanted to hear that others are doing it and not having issues. Yes, I'm aware that the original page should using SSL which we're going to do anyway for our own security reasons.

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6. Marc Guyer closed this discussion on 18 Dec, 2011 03:23 PM.