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Arbitrary recurring frequency

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Stuart Henry

27 Jun, 2010 04:29 AM

I'm building a winery's website, they offer Wine Club subscriptions to customers wherein they ship wine to customers on some sort of schedule (quarterly, bi-annually, etc), and they bill credit cards a day or two before shipment.

With a standard recurrence model (monthly, quarterly, etc.) the billing would be triggered whether or not the items are going to be shipped. Since wineries often have spastic stock issues these shipments don't follow a nice schedule and aren't a good fit for traditional recurring billing.

I would like the ability to manually trigger billing of wine club subscribers so that billing can be directly tied to shipments, and the winery has control over the billing schedule in case they need to skip shipments or whatever.

Is this kind of thing possible with CheddarGetter? As far as I can tell, (most) wineries manage their wine club subscribers in a non PCI-compliant manner. I'd like to do things above board and keep cc numbers out of Excel sheets.

Thanks for any info,

Stu

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Marc Guyer on 29 Jun, 2010 01:11 PM

   

   Hi Stu -- Sorry for the delayed response. That sounds a little bit complicated but let's see if we can come up with something...

   For starters, in CG, all subsequent billing dates are based on when the customer signed up. The initial bill date is set based on this moment (according to your config). Since it sounds like you ship for everyone at the same time, you'd need to artificially delay new customers' initial bill dates to some unified date in the future (your normal shipping cycle). You'd have to manage that cycle yourself (e.g.: 2/14, 5/14, 8/14, 11/14). You would simply override the initial bill date for a new signup to be the next ship date in the cycle.

   Next, since you're not sure when you're going to actually ship the 8/14 shipment, you would force the next quarterly bill to be delayed to some arbitrary date in the future. Otherwise, CG will automatically charge everyone on 8/14. Then when you're ready to ship, set everyone's next invoice date to now. Everyone gets billed, then you ship.

   The ability to delay the next bill date is not currently available so you wouldn't be able to do this right now. We do have this feature on our short list for development, however. It shouldn't be long. What is your timeline?

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2. Marc Guyer closed this discussion on 29 Jun, 2010 01:11 PM.

3. stuarthenry re-opened this discussion on 29 Jun, 2010 03:19 PM

4. 2 Posted by stuarthenry on 29 Jun, 2010 03:19 PM

   

   Hi Marc,

   Thanks for your reply. After thinking about this problem in the context of
   my current client (very small winery that produces only one wine per year)
   I think I'm going to talk him out of this "Wine Club" approach in favor of
   a mailing list and discount codes.

   Wine Clubs really only make sense for larger wineries, so this feature is
   something I would be looking for down the road (+/- a year or so), so no
   immediate need.

   In the implementation you described, would I need to delay the billing for
   each customer and shipment? Or could I just set a global start_date from
   which point all recurring billing is based, rather than the customer's
   created_at date?

   This approach might work for billing memberships as well... if an
   organization's memberships expire every 3/1, the global start_date could be
   set to 3/1 with an initial charge applied at registration (reflecting the
   membership dues at the time the user registers) and re-charged on 3/1.

   Is there a way to handle memberships like this in CG at this time? I just
   finished a website for a non-profit (calsmith.org) and they would like to
   handle memberships thru the website some time in the future, and I'm just
   trying to get my head around how that might be implemented.

   Thanks for your time and expertise,

   Stu

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5. Support Staff 3 Posted by Marc Guyer on 29 Jun, 2010 03:34 PM

   

   I've just added Jonathon to this thread. He's been looking into the wine club market for CG. He'll probably have an opinion for you on the subject.

   In the implementation you described, would I need to delay the billing for each customer and shipment? Or could I just set a global start_date from
   which point all recurring billing is based, rather than the customer's
   created_at date?

   Management of this must be done in your app.

   Is there a way to handle memberships like this in CG at this time?

   If you mean as you described...

   with an initial charge applied at registration (reflecting the membership dues at the time the user registers) and re-charged on 3/1

   .. then yes. You could use the setup fee to bill immediately on signup and delay the initial recurring bill until 3/1.

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6. Marc Guyer closed this discussion on 29 Jun, 2010 03:34 PM.