Only for recurring payments?
Is Cheddar Getter only for recurring payments? Or can it be used to process one-time payments as well? I guess I'm confused about things because it requires you to enter set products, but our business does not always have set products. Some times we just need to bill someone for a one-time payment. Just curious how that works with the system (or if it even works at all). Thanks.
Discussions are closed to public comments.
If you need help with Cheddar please
start a new discussion.
Keyboard shortcuts
Generic
| ? | Show this help |
|---|---|
| ESC | Blurs the current field |
Comment Form
| r | Focus the comment reply box |
|---|---|
| ^ + ↩ | Submit the comment |
You can use Command ⌘ instead of Control ^ on Mac
Support Staff 1 Posted by Marc Guyer on 22 Sep, 2009 02:23 PM
We have a one-time feature in development right now. Every customer must be subscribed to a monthly plan (but it can be a "free" one) and then you can run a one-time transaction for the customer.
Support Staff 2 Posted by Marc Guyer on 22 Sep, 2009 06:23 PM
I suppose I could be a bit clearer... CG, at the heart, is a recurring billing system where customers' subscriptions can accumulate charges over time and they are billed for the charges at the end of the payment cycle. In other words, you can have a one-time "charge" that is added to the customer's next invoice. They will then be billed at the end of the current period for that charge as well as any other charges that occurred during the period.
An analogy for this process: You render service for a customer and send them a bill. They then remit payment at the end of the month. The only difference about this is that you know you'll get paid because you have the customer's credit card information.
Another advantage to this system is a per-transaction fee savings. With CG, you will only pay a maximum of one per-transaction fee to the gateway and merchant account provider per customer per payment period. This can be quite significant if you otherwise would have several transactions per period.
That might shed some light -- I could help more if I had more information about the nature of your business and how you charge for goods and services.
3 Posted by Russell Tanner on 22 Sep, 2009 06:38 PM
Thanks for the information. Let me give you a little bit of background on how we're going to be using the system. We have a web development company. We provide optional hosting to our customers. There are various tiers of hosting, ranging from $10/month to $90/month. There are also several hosting add-ons (optional) that range from $3-5 / month.
Most of our hosting plans will be fixed. However, we occasionally make exceptions to the monthly hosting cost (we might shave a few bucks off the monthly fee in order to get the business). How are exceptions like that handled in the Cheddar system? If we told a $90/month hosting customer that we would give it to them for $85/month, would we have to create a completely separate plan for that one customer? Or is there a way of making exceptions within a plan?
We're also curious how Tracked Items work. Because we offer the optional add ons, would those be considered Tracked Items? If so, how are they set up and what would we put in the Quantity Included, Overage Amount, and Is Periodic fields?
And lastly, we're confused about the difference between a "Product" and a "Pricing Plan."
Thanks a lot for your help.
Russell
Support Staff 4 Posted by Marc Guyer on 22 Sep, 2009 08:30 PM
The Pricing Plans and Quick Start Guide Knowlege Base articles should help with many of your questions. I'll address some options for your specific model:
Ok this is pretty simple, but I'm going to add a bit of complexity so you can get a sense of the flexibility:
You'd have the hosting packages tiered at say, $10/mo, $50/mo and $90/mo. Say you have an analytics add-on. For the $10 plan, the add-on is $4. For the $50 plan, the add-on is $3. For the $90 plan, analytics is included. So, you'd create a tracked item called "Analytics". Then, in the $10 plan, you'd set the quantity included to zero, the overage amount to 4.00 and the periodic checkbox should be unchecked. The same goes for the $50 plan except you'd set the overage amount to 3.00. For the $90 plan, you'd set the quantity included to one (1) and the overage amount to zero.
When someone signs up for the $10 or $50 plan and they chose to get the analytics, you would set the customer's current item quantity usage to one (1) for the analytics item. Say, for example you charge for the analytics add-on per hosted domain. You would just keep incrementing the item quantity usage for the analytics item for each hosted domain and CG would charge for the item accordingly.
A product is just the name of your company or service -- this is your main account. A pricing plan is a set of rules for charging for your service. You can have many pricing plans for different pricing options for your service.
5 Posted by seth on 26 Sep, 2009 07:14 AM
So we have a service that may have a percentage transaction fee that is different for each plan and that is calculated each month by us. Would that amount be able to be passed uniquely for each customer and added on to their recurring monthly fee?
Can this be done now or will this be addressed by the one-time charge feature that you share is in development be able to address say a monthly per-transaction fee? If the latter is there any eta you feel comfortable sharing?
Support Staff 6 Posted by Marc Guyer on 27 Sep, 2009 10:27 PM
Seth -- You can add a custom charge to a customer's invoice at any time. So, when you calculate it each month, you'd just add it to the customer's invoice.
You might also be able to creatively use tracked items so that you don't need to perform this calculation for each customer each month. If you'll explain in detail what this charge is and how it's calculated for each plan, I might be able to come up with an easy solution for you.
Marcela Poffald closed this discussion on 11 Apr, 2018 06:03 PM.