Please allow us to select different payment methods whenever a customer wishes to purchase a "one-time addon".
We are kind of a unique business in that the subscription products we offer are for physical items —we rent musical instruments. We also sell music-related accessories, which we have set up as one-time addons associated with our subscription plans.
Often times, customers will come in to purchase a one-time addon and request that they pay in cash, or pay using a different credit card than is currently associated with their subscription. Well... we can't do that in Zoho Billing. Therefore, in order for a customer to purchase a one-time addon with cash or a different credit card, we have to:
- Open a new browser window and go to Zoho Invoice
- Search for and find the customer
- Create an invoice from scratch
- Create the item(s) customer wants to purchase (which for us means manually typing in the item name, description, and price, since none of the addons we set up in Zoho Billing are available for selection in Zoho Invoice)
- Save the invoice (as Draft)
- Mark it as "Sent" so we can pay it
- Click "record payment"
- Save the cash payment
- Email the receipt to the customer
Compare this with the procedure for when customers pay using a credit card on file:
- Click "Add One Time Addon"
- Select the item you want to sell
- Save
As you can see, it's infinitely easier when customers pay with credit card, and a huge pain in the ass when they don't.
Another issue with using Zoho Invoice to charge for addons is that those invoices aren't in any way associated with the subscription. This creates 2 problems:
- The invoice we create in Zoho Invoice won't ever show up in the subscription's invoice history in Zoho Billing. Therefore, the only way to know if a subscription customer has purchased an addon is to search their transaction history in Zoho Invoice. What a pain.
- Zoho Billing's "Sales by Addon" reports for seeing which addons were sold (and how many) in a given time-period, have no way of knowing when addons were sold using Zoho Invoice. So that report is useless.
While I appreciate the current simplicity and streamlined process of adding one-time addons to a subscription, we require the ability to specify the payment method.
Thank you,
Josh