Subscriptions

At the heart of Caribou’s membership website management capabilities lies subscription management. Subscription packages are recurring (either automatically or manually – see Gateway Integrations) fees that are charged at recurring intervals to a user until cancellation or expiry. Subscriptions can promote a user to a usergroup upon subscription and demote a user upon cancellation. For example, by promoting users to a group called “Subscribers”, you can restrict content or products to subscribed users by making them only accessible to the Subscribers user group. Also, you could demote users to a group called “Expired Accounts” and target specific content or navigation links (such as a link that says “Renew Now!”) to this particular usergroup.

Adding / Editing Subscription Packages

Below are the options and fields one must consider when adding or editing a subscription package to their website:

• Name is the name of the subscription package. It’s used in order forms, invoices, billing histories, etc., so keep it short and sweet.
• Package Details is a short description of the subscription package. Again, it’s used all over your site so don’t make this your primary sales text – just use it to give an overview of the benefits of subscribing.
• Fee (in your Currency) is the fee for the subscription.
• Fee Recurrence (in Days) is the time interval between recurring fee billings. For auto-recurring gateways, this will be billed automatically. For manual gateways, the user will have to have renewed their subscription manually some point between their last renewal and this upcoming expiration. If a user renews before the expiration date, Caribou will push back their expiration date by this number of days (basically, users can renew at any time).

  Set this to “Package Never Expires” for a one-time payment subscription.

• Automatically charge recurring subscription fee?, when checked, will tell Caribou to use your payment gateways’ auto-recurring billing feature if it is available.
• Recurrences is the number of total payments to charge using auto-recurring billing (if available) before allowing the subscription to expire and require a manual renewal by the user. You may want to set this to 12 (for monthly subscriptions) to a) ensure your users still want the subscription and, b) get new credit card details once per year.
• Free Trial Period will make the package free for a set number of days. The user will not need to give billing details at the initial signup. The free trial is only available once per user per package.
• Promotes User to Group is the usergroup that you want to add to a user’s account upon subscription. They will be removed from this group at expiration. By using this feature, you can restrict access to certain site content and components by targeting a usergroup (or multiple usergroups).
• Demotes User to Group is the usergroup that you want to add to a user’s account upon cancellation/expiration.
• Add-on Products are products from your Store that will be suggested at checkout in a page like, “Would you like to add these to your order?”. These are a great way to cross-sell.
• The Welcome Email is an email that will be sent to your user upon initial subscription creation. They won’t receive this email for subscription renewals. You can use the site tags listed to personalize the email.

Each subscription package has its own link. If users access this link directly, they will not be prompted to select their subscription type in the checkout process. This link looks like http://www.example.com/user/action/register/type/[typeid].

Using Coupons to Provide Subscription Discounts

Coupons are promotional codes that can be entered upon checkout for discounts on the subscription price. Caribou offers different types of coupons for subscription packages:

• (Your Currency) Discount is a straightforward coupon that subtracts a certain monetary amount off of the subscription fee for the first month.
• % Discount subtracts a percentage of the subscription off for the first month. This is a good code to use if you are offering a code for use across multiple subscription packages because the savings are relative to the total price of the package.
• Free Trial (in Days) will give a free trial to the subscription package for X days. Users will not be required to submit billing details at purchase – they will do this when the free trial expires.
• One-Time Fee (in Your Currency) giving access to a specific date will do exactly what it says. You can charge users a one-time fee for a package and all packages will expire on the same date. This is a rarely used coupon format.

Only one coupon code can be used per purchase. Furthermore, you can limit use of coupon codes when adding a coupon code to the site (restrict uses per person, per package, until a certain date, and to certain subscription packages).

If a user uses a coupon code, it will appear in their Billing History page in the control panel. You can also see a count of how many times each code was used in Subscriptions > Coupons.

Adding Subscriptions to Accounts

Most users will add a subscription to an account by accessing the subscribe component on your website and going through the checkout process. Once paid, the subscription is automatically added and you don’t have to do any work.

You can also manually add subscriptions to accounts in the control panel. Using Member Search, find the target user. You can click the “Add Sub” icon for the user to add a subscription to their account. Or, if a user is active in the control panel, you can select “Add Subscription” from the drop-down menu. All subscriptions added in the control panel cost $0.00. Users will receive notification of the subscription of the subscription and get a receipt for $0.00.