Subscriptions

Subscriptions marry a customer order to a particular payment Plan and initiate the Recurring Engine to manage your future billing. You create a Subscription using either an Authorization or a Sale transaction. In the Auth/Sale you simply include a <recurringRequest> element to initialize the Subscription using a named Plan and set the start date for the first recurring bill. If you do not include a start date, the Recurring Engine uses the current date for the first payment.

If the recurring bill had an associated set-up or one-time fee use a Sale transaction. The amount of the Sale transaction would represent that fee, whereas the amount of future recurring payments are defined in the Plan. If you use an Authorization to create the Subscription, the transaction would normally be a $0 Auth (or small amount followed by a reversal) and would include the billing information for Address Verification.

As part of the Subscription creation, you can also override both the number of payments and the amount, as well as include Add Ons and Discounts (discussed in the next section). The overrides give you a granular control to modify a standard payments Plan for a particular consumer without creating additional Plans. For example, if you offered a 1-year Plan with monthly payments as shown in the previous section, you could allow a consumer to complete their payments in 10 months instead of a year. In this case you would override the number of payments defined in the Plan (12) with 10 payments, while increasing the amount of each payment from $50 to $60.

Example:  Subscription with Overrides