How do Recurring Packages Work?
With the Pricing Manager extension, you can create price packages that generate automatic payments for a set period (or unlimited).
- You can create price packages with regular payments for a set or unlimited time, for example:
$10 every month for the next 12 months
$100 every year until the subscription is canceled
- When a user submits a listing using a recurring package, the user agrees with the gateway (for example, PayPal or Stripe) that the gateway can make automatic payments based on the package you created.
- The gateway will now make the payments automatically based on the agreed schedule.
- You or the user can cancel the agreement anytime directly at the gateway.
- Payments can fail if the user does not have enough money in the gateway account or a connected credit card has expired.
- The gateway and your website communicate the payments or failed payments automatically.
- If a user cancels their recurring agreement, then the listing will follow the downgrade process at the previously set expire date, not immediately due to cancellation.
For transaction testing, you will need test credit cards for your payment gateway sandbox.
Agreements between your users and the gateway must be set up by submitting a listing from the front end of your website.
You cannot create subscriptions on behalf of your users. It is the user that has to agree with the gateway. You also cannot raise the price of existing recurring agreements.
Some gateways cannot be used with recurring packages.
You cannot use the Test Payment for recurring packages because it is not an actual gateway.
If you use HTTP Basis Authentication on your website, IPN Notifications from the gateway will NOT be received, and IPN requests will not be executed on your website (for example: payment success, renew, downgrade or expire etc).
Related Settings and Features
Expire date field
When you specify an expiry date using the 'expire date' field for your recurring or non-recurring listings, it refers to the date until which the given listing's offerings might be valid for the users. This expire date field included on all CPTs does not, in any way, affect the actual listing on the site itself.
Package Expiration Dates
Recurring listings can only expire/downgrade when the concerned subscription is canceled/completed/deleted. The package expiration date, specified for recurring listings, has no impact whatsoever on the expiration/deletion of the actual listing unless the subscription is deleted or canceled.
The actual expiration date is set automatically by the package is stored in the Pricing Manager addon database and is not editable directly.
Recurring Payment Emails
GeoDirectory does not send pre-expiry email reminders for recurring packages. The recurring payments are handled automatically by the gateway.
Looking to start an online subscription business? Check out this blog post.
Recurring Free Listings
Many members choose to downgrade paid packages to a free package before downgrading further from the free package to 'expired'.
For downgrade to a free package, the free package must be recurring or never expire. By default free packages cannot be renewed, and we recommend that, but, if you like, you can also use the option in the Pricing Manager settings to allow free listing packages to be renewed, in which case pre-expiry emails can direct the listing owner to click the renew link on the listing and renew the fre package or upgrade to a paid package.
Renewal and Upgrade Links
Renew and Upgrade are both displayed automatically by the GD Author Actions widget.
The renew link will start to display at the point when the first pre-expiry email is scheduled to be sent.
Upgrade links display when a package has 'has upgrades' set and their are more expensive packages available.