Tip #10 : Customizing the checkout page for your billing needs

Hello everyone,
We've been sharing a tip every week to address specific business scenarios which can be implemented for your subscription business. Last week, we shared a tip about the different ways of creating a subscription for your customers. This week we will be looking at how you can customize the checkout page for your billing needs.

Hosted Payment pages allow you to collect the personal and payment information from your customers. For any subscription business, say a box-type business (or) a SaaS business (or) a membership business, the hosted payment page can be used as a checkout/signup page. Your customers can choose the product or service of their choice and pay for them through the hosted payment page.

The hosted payment pages are PCI-compliant by default and they are highly secure, complying with all security standards. Hence, by deploying the hosted payment page, you don't have to worry about PCI compliance.

Setting up a hosted payment page:

The Hosted Payment page URL will be generated whenever a new plan is created in Zoho Subscriptions and you can use that URL to embed the payment page in your website. There would be two major requirements while using the hosted payment page;

1. Maintaining the brand consistency on the Hosted Payment page.
2. Customizing the pricing information.

Now, let's see how you can maintain the brand consistency and customize the pricing information in Zoho Subscriptions.

1) Mainitaining the brand consistency on the Payment page

You can add your company logo to appear at the top of the hosted payment page, which reflects better that the payment page is designed exclusively for your business.

Besides, you could also set a theme, sent the font color & size and change the text fields' label & size to reflect the mood of your business.

At times, there may be a need to collect additional information from the customers that your business may require. You can collect such information with the help of custom fields in Zoho Subscriptions. As of now, the hosted payment page supports custom fields of type Dropdown, Text, Email, Decimal, Percentage, Phone, Number, URL, Amount and Date. To know more, click here.

2) Customizing the Pricing information:

Customizing the pricing information is another important requirement. The customization can involve changing the properties related to a plan such as changing the plan's base price, modifying the number billing cycles, changing the plan's recurrence frequency, choosing a custom start date for the subscription and so on.

In such cases, you can use our API Hosted pages to provide us with the customized information relating to the plan, and we will provide you with a unique payment URL which you can load for your customer. The unique payment URL will handle the payment processing for your business.

To understand this better, we have explained a few frequently asked scenarios below.

i) Generate a Pricing Table for your website

The majority of the subscription businesses will have their own website that lists their products (or) services. These websites will have a detailed pricing page where the customers can select a plan as per their requirements and check out instantly. To help you with the process, Zoho Subscriptions provides you with the Embed Widget feature.

You can learn more about this use-case over this link , where we have explained it with a demo.

ii) Tax Integrated Checkout - Apply tax based on the customer's region:

In some businesses, there is a scenario where the tax is applied based on the user's region. For such cases, you have to gather information regarding the customer's region with the help of an online form in your website and decide the appropriate tax depending on the region. Once the tax information is gathered, you can use the API Hosted Page (by sending the appropriate tax information) to generate a unique payment URL with the appropriate tax applied on the plan's price.

You can use the online form builders for this purpose to collect information from the customer. View this post on how to integrate online form builders with Zoho Subscriptions. For this scenario, we have created a demo where we used Zoho Creator as our form builder to create a form wherein the customer can select his region and then proceed to checkout. Depending on the selected region, the tax will be applied for the customer. You can view this demo in this link .

iii) Future Date Checkout - Choose the start date depending on customer:

For certain businesses, it generally takes two to three days for the shipment to reach the customer. In such cases, instead of billing the customer immediately from the date when he/she checks out, you can start the subscription a little late depending on your shipping date. In order to do this, you can use the API Hosted page by providing a suitable start date for the subscription and load the customized payment URL which is obtained.

By doing so, the subscription will be created in Future state and the customer will be billed on the provided start date. To know more about this use case, you can view the demo here which we have created to explain this scenario.

You can learn more about this use-case over this link , where we have explained it with a demo.

Found this useful? Try it out for your subscription business and let us know. If you have any queries, feel free to comment below. We are here to answer them.

Cheers,
Sasidaran K,
The Zoho Subscriptions Team.