Ability to specify the pricing plans shown on the hosted payment pages

nikolas's Avatar

nikolas

07 Sep, 2011 02:45 PM

Hi,

for our business we would love to be able to limit the pricing plans a customer can see on the hosted payment pages.
For example to offer different prices in different countries. In our case we have reduced prices for low income countries etc. But I can see many more things being possible with this.

I see two solutions:

  1. Add a group field to the pricing plan (or a little more complex a mapping table so that a plan can be in multiple groups)
    When redirecting to the hosted payment page the group (or preferably group id) is passed on as a parameter.

  2. When redirecting to the hosted payment page its possible to pass on the pricing plan ids of the pricing plans that should be available.

With these changes its 100% up to the site owner to determine which plans are shown. In our case we would determine the country of our visitor, look up if he is part of any special pricing group (on our end) and then redirect to the appropriate hosted payment page with the necessary arguments.

But you can easily see that really any logic can be used to segment the prices, this not limited to countries.

  1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Marc Guyer on 09 Sep, 2011 02:27 PM

    Marc Guyer's Avatar

    Hi Nikolas -- While we do not have plans to implement the changes you describe, I think it's possible to achieve your desired result in a different way.

    First, you can avoid the hosted pages altogether when initially signing up a customer as long as no payment data is required. For example, you could signup customer entirely via API to a "free" plan (maybe just as a placeholder). Then, when the customer is ready to enter payment details, you may send them to the hosted pages and enable them to only enter payment data (not choose a plan). Then, you're free to switch the customer to any paid plan via the API only. In order to use this technique, you'll need to check the "Disallow pricing plan changes in the hosted pages" option here: https://cheddargetter.com/admin/hosted-settings/preferences

    Using this technique, you control all aspects of the customer experience except for simply entering payment information.

  2. 2 Posted by nikolas on 20 Sep, 2011 12:48 PM

    nikolas's Avatar

    Hi Marc,

    after reviewing your suggestion and actually trying it out a number of different ways I have one show stopper issue still.

    In our test process a Customer is created and already assigned to a paid plan (without having any payment details supplied, by disabling "Require payment method on paid subscriptions")

    Now we redirect the customer to the HPP (with the option Disallow pricing plan changes in the hosted pages on).
    The only thing he can do here is to add/change payment details. Why is this not automatically expanded then? We feel that many of our customers would be confused and they would rather stop the process than click some link to cause the payment method expansion.

  3. 3 Posted by nikolas on 20 Sep, 2011 01:07 PM

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    also, how can we hide the company field, we only have private customers

  4. Support Staff 4 Posted by Marc Guyer on 20 Sep, 2011 03:16 PM

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    You can instruct the update page to auto expand the payment area by passing in the method param. Just append &method=cc to the update link.

    You can turn on/off fields here.

  5. 5 Posted by Clay Nichols on 01 Dec, 2011 07:34 PM

    Clay Nichols's Avatar

    We have a similar issue (different pricing for different countries).

    Another way to do tihs is to have a flag which causes the Hosted Payment page to show ONLY the PLanCode you passed to the \create API.

    (I.e., right now I can pass PlanCode=USA.Plan and it's preselected on the Hosted Payment page, but the customer could change it to Australia.Plan or something. But if you have a flag like ShowOnlyThisPlanCode=1 then they couldn't see the plan code.

  6. Support Staff 6 Posted by Marc Guyer on 02 Dec, 2011 02:22 PM

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    You can use the "Disallow pricing plan change on create page when plan code parameter is passed in" option here

  7. 7 Posted by nikolas on 02 Dec, 2011 02:40 PM

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    @Marc
    As he stated before the customer could change the planCode manually and therefore do something undesirable. But in fact there is no way to get rid of this problem when exposing the planCodes in the way cheddar does (being parameters).

  8. Dean closed this discussion on 18 Jan, 2013 03:40 PM.

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