Tip #9 : Different ways to create a subscription for your customer

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 how to implement metered billing with Google Sheet. This week we will be looking at the different ways to create subscriptions for your customers.

Let's say you are the owner of a gym and a fitness centre. Your customers can subscribe to your gym in two ways:

Automatic: The customer goes through your website and subscribes online.
Manual: The customers come directly to your gym and you manually onboard them.

Let's look into the above processes in detail.

1) Automatic Subscriptions:

Majority of 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 use the Embed Widget feature to create a Checkout Button and Pricing Table for your plans. The Checkout Button and Pricing Table can be embedded on your website. Embedding this feature in your website is to make it easier for your customers to get information about the plans you offer through the Pricing Table and instantly subscribe to a plan of their choice, by clicking the Checkout Button.

Refer to this video for a more detailed information.

2) Manual Subscriptions - Onboard the customers from Zoho Subscriptions dashboard:

For manually on-boarding your customers, you have to create a new customer in Zoho Subscriptions. After creating a customer, there are three ways to collect the payments.

When the customer pays via cash or card:

Once the customer has been created in Zoho Subscriptions, create a new subscription for the customer. Then choose the Payment Mode as Offline and record the payment for the first billing cycle in the following page. A subscription will now be created for the customer and the first created invoice will be marked as paid.
When you send an invoice to the customer and they opt to pay online:

After creating a new customer, create a new subscription for the customer by choosing the Payment Mode as Offline and choose the configured payment gateway of your choice. A subscription will now be created and an invoice will be sent to the customer via email automatically with a link to pay for it. Your customers can click the link on the email to make the payment.
When the customers give their card details to charge them on every renewal:

Customers might also give you their card details to charge them upon every renewal and send an invoice copy to them for the same. To help you with these type of payments, Zoho Subscriptions provides you with the Request Payment Page. You can easily send an email to the customer with a link to update their card details using the Request Payment page.

Once the customer has updated the card details, you will be notified with an in-app notification. After that, you can create a new subscription for the customer by choosing Payment Mode as Online and the Card has the payment option for the customer. The customer will then be charged automatically every month and an invoice will be sent to them.

All the above-mentioned ways can be done via;

i) Zoho Subscriptions dashboard;

ii) APIs; and

iii) Mobile Apps.

Refer to this video for a more detailed explanation. If you have any queries, feel free to comment below. We are here to answer them.

Cheers,

Sasidaran K,
The Zoho Subscriptions Team.