Recurring Prepaid Subscriptions

Chord allows your customers to purchase and subscribe to a prepaid recurring subscription .

A recurring prepaid subscription is where the purchaser (customer) subscribes to a product /s by making upfront payments for the subscription on a recurring cyclical billing period basis. The customer will make a payment at checkout for the subscription for the first billing period. Then once all subscription installments for that billing period have been fulfilled, the subscription will automatically renew and the customer will be charged again for the next period.

For example, a customer susbcribes to a 3 month prepaid subscription. This means the customer will prepay for the 3 months upfront. Their product will be fulfilled once every month, and once all products for the first 3 months have been fulfilled. The subscription will renew and the customer will prepay for the next 3 months.

Not to be confused for prepaid gift subscriptions where the subscription completes after the first billing period.

The purchaser chooses a recurring prepaid subscription and specifies the installment count( the number of subscription installments to be fulfilled) and interval of fulfillment (how frequent and installment should be fufilled). For example an installment count of 3 and an interval of 3 months, means a subscription installment will be fulfilled once every month.

The purchaser is then directed to Checkout, as the recurring subscription skips the Cart, using the "Buy Now" flow, and is prepaid in full in a single transaction. As such, no other items other than prepaid subscription items can be added to the order.

When the order is complete, the purchaser receives an email to confirm their subscription. Then every month for the next 3 months the purchaser will recieve their subscription installments. Then once all prepaid installments have been fulfilled and the customer is due for their next installment, they will be charged for the next 3 months and the cycle will repeat until the customer cancels their susbcription.

A Billing Period is a recurring fixed length of time where the customer will be charged for subscribing to a recurring prepaid subscription.

The diagram further illustrates the above as the following example:

As a customer I have subscribed to a $90 subscription where I will get billed every 3 months. Within that 3 month billing period, I will receive 1 subscription installment every month. After that 3 month period is up, I will be charged $90 again to cover the next 3 months, where I will receive 1 subscription installment per month within that 3 month period and so on.

The billing period is configured on the backend, and this billing period is what will set the schedulder to issue a renewal payment to a customer. So an installment count of 3 and an interval of 1 month will then mean a subscription will have a 3 month billing period. So following the example above, the recurring subscription will have a 3 month billing period where the customer will be charged $90 upfront and they will recieve an installment once a month.

On the Stripe checkout page under the product description, we clearly communicate to the customer what they are signing up for, for how long, and the renewal amount which they can confirm before checking out. This description is customizable in the OMS using the environment variable: STRIPE_PREPAID_SUBSCRIPTION_CONSENT_MESSAGE.

Prepaid subscriptions can be viewed in the OMS under the Subscriptions/Prepaid subscriptions tab.

When a prepaid subscription record has been clicked into, this will open a more detailed description of the subscription. The fulfilled installments, total installments, fuflfilled total and purchased total all reset every billing period.



Updating a subscription

Once a prepaid subscription has been purchased, the only modifications or updates that can be made to the subscription is the shipping address. As of now the customer will have to contact customer support to do this as this can only be done in the OMS.

Canceling a subscription

A recurring prepaid subscription can be cancelled at an time within a billing period. The system will issue a refund in the form of a store credit to refund unfilfilled subscription installments.