One of the key features that MivaPay offers is the ability to configure subscription type products and charge reoccurring billing with your Miva Merchant online store. In this video, we're going to look at setting up a subscription product in a store that already has MivaPay installed and configured.
This video is Part 4 of the Miva Pay video series and presumes your store is already configured with MivaPay as detailed in the previous videos of this series. If you need a refresher on setting up MivaPay, please go back and watch those videos. If you've already done all of that, let's continue and we'll dive into creating a Subscription product in your store.
Once you've logged into the Miva Merchant Admin, click into the "Catalog" and create a new product, or select an existing product that you want to work with. You'll want to be in the "Edit" screen for that product. Scroll down until you see a tab section called "Subscription Settings." Here you will see a list of settings that you can check and uncheck. The first one, called "Enabled" is the only setting on this page that's required to be checked in order for this product to be a subscription product in your store. All of the other Subscription settings here are optional settings that inform how the subscription product looks and behaves from a customer perspective on your store. If "Required Subscription When Purchased" is left unchecked, when a customer clicks into the Product page for this item, they'll see that they have a choice to purchase this product as a normal product like every other product in your store or to purchase this product using a Subscription option. Alternatively, if "Requires Subscription When Purchasing Product" is checked, then the customer will only be able to purchase the product by selecting one of the subscription terms in a drop down menu. Moving on, the four settings that begin with the word "Allow" all pertain to giving the customer the option of changing the details of a subscription after a subscription item has been purchased and the subscription is currently in effect.
For instance, if "Allow Subscriptions to be Cancelled Prior to Expiration" is checked, a customer with a subscription would be allowed to log into their store account, pull up their subscription order and cancel the subscription early if desired. For this example we will checkmark "Enabled"and we'll save these settings by clicking on the "Update" button. Now that the product is configured to be a subscription product, we need to decide what it's subscription terms should be. To do that, we'll want to click in to the subscription terms tab. Terms created here will appear on the product screen in a drop down menu called terms. To create a "Term" click on this "+" icon. Each Subscription Term we create will be made up of three items of information. The term, the frequency, and the description. The term defines how many orders are in a subscription term. So, setting this to three, for instance, will make it so that a subscription will trigger new purchases of this product for three billing cycles and then the subscription will be fulfilled and end. Note, that setting this field to 0 will make this subscription renew indefinitely until canceled.
Frequency will define how often the subscription will retrigger. So, if I set this to monthly, configured like so, this subscription would renew once a month for three months. Depending on what you have configured for the terms and the frequency, the description will auto-populate with the intelligent text. Though, you can type in a custom text override if you like, by bubbling in customer and typing in this text area field. We'll use the "Autogenerate" field for this example and click on the "Add" button. Here is the autogenerated text,. "Reorder every month for the next 3 months." Let's repeat the process for a six month term. Notice that frequency doesn't have to be just monthly. You actually have a robust number of ways you can configure the frequency. Depending on what you choose for frequency, additional sub options for frequency may appear in this configuration dialogue. For example, if we select "Every N Days (From Purchase Date)," we'll see a setting up here where we can plug in a number so we can retrigger a subscription purchase every 10 days, or every 45 days, etc. It may be worth it to explore different options for frequency as your bound to find one that fits your specific needs best. After you're done configuring your terms, click on the "Add" button to save your work. Now, when we visit this product in the store we can see the product is offered as a subscription item and the item can be reordered every 3 months, every 6 months or on a 45 day subscription billing cycle. Alternatively, the customer can still opt to not order the product as a subscription and they can just add the product to their basket like normal. And that's how you set up a subscription product using MivaPay.