PayPal Subscriptions: Different Pricing Plans

[bajingan]

Hello all,

I'm setting up a website that will sell subscription with different pricing plans. For example:

Plan A: $30/month
Plan B: $50/month
Plan C: $70/month
Each plan has a 5-day free trial period

So my questions are...

1) How can I provide these different pricing for each plan with PayPal? Do I need to create a seperate PayPal button for each plan for customers to choose from?

2) If a customer wants to upgrade or downgrade their plan, how can I accomodate this? I read the manual, which is not very clear on this, and it says I could create a seperate modify button that allows customers to modify their existing plan. But from what I gathered, the modify button would let you change to one plan only, e.g. change to Plan C only, but not to Plan A or Plan B. What it means is that for each plan I offer, I would have to create a modify button for each of them. So the customers would see something like this:

- To change your current plan to Plan A, click this [modify button A]
- To change your current plan to Plan B, click this [modify button B]
- To change your current plan to Plan C, click this [modify button C]

Is this right?

3) Related to Question 2, would PayPal's modify button calculate the price difference between 2 plans when a customer upgrade or downgrade their plan by taking consideration of the subscription time left in the original plan? For example:

Customer John has been on Plan A for 10 days and now wants to upgrade to Plan B. PayPal would charge $50 for the new plan. But since PayPal had already received a monthly payment of $30 for the current plan and still had 20 days to go, it would have to refund the unused portion of the payment of the current plan, which is $20. So the net payment due for this month would be $30 ($50 - $20) instead of $50.

Would PayPal do this?

4) Would it be possible for customers to abuse the free trial by cancelling the subscription before the free trial expires and then signing up again and again?

5) Do you know why PayPal doesn't offer the "account optional" feature for subscriptions? All customers must open an account with PayPal first before they can make any subscription payment. This would turn away many potential customers.

Thank you!

[pp_rb]

You can use one button as both the signup and modify button for a given plan. You need to have the customer select which plan they want on your site before sending them over to PayPal, but that does not necessarily need to be through 3 separate buttons. You could use a drop-down menu and some Javascript to set the appropriate values for the plan the customer selects.

When a customer modifies a subscription, I believe the new plan they select kicks in at the next regular billing cycle. For example, if the customer signs up for Plan B that bills monthly, then uses the modify option to switch to Plan C halfway through the month, they will not get billed the $70 subscription price for Plan C until the end of the first month. If you need your customers to have intant access to the upgraded plans, it may work better if you dynamically create a new subscription button for them that charges a prorated amount for the remaining part of the month, or you can have them sign up for the regular Plan C and manually refund them for the unused portion of the month under Plan B. (In either case, it would mean you would not want to use the "modify" variable in your PayPal button.)

I don't know if PayPal has any logic built in to prevent a customer from cancelling subscriptions and signing up again, so you may want to adjust the way that you allow access to the suscription if you are concerned about people abusing the free trial. (E.g. build in some form of automatic check or manual review before allowing access if you are seeing suspicious behavior.)

[bajingan]

Hi,

Thanks for the info.

I have some questions though.

If you need your customers to have intant access to the upgraded plans, it may work better if you dynamically create a new subscription button for them that charges a prorated amount for the remaining part of the month,...

1) To create this dynamically generated new subscription button means that I (or my program to be exact) have to know how many days left till the end of this month's billing cycle, correct? How can I get this information easily? Does it mean I have to create a backend database that records all the subscribers' first activation dates? Is there an easier way to do this?

Perhaps it would be easier if PayPal let us set the start of a billing cycle to a fixed date of every month, for example on the 1st of every month. (Can they do this? Just to make sure.) That way it would be easier to find out how many days left for the current cycle.

... or you can have them sign up for the regular Plan C and manually refund them for the unused portion of the month under Plan B. (In either case, it would mean you would not want to use the "modify" variable in your PayPal button.)

2) With both methods above, would they need to cancel their current Plan B first before signing up to Plan C?

3) But what if my Plan C button has a 5-day free trial? I certainly don't want to give another free trial to an existing customer. Or, are you saying I would have to create a new Plan C button that has no free trial? But then, how could I stop them from using the other Plan C button with a free trial? A manual review like you said maybe?

Thanks.