Tips and Tricks #18: How to Move Trials to Paid Subscriptions with the API

Continuing from where we left off last week's post about managing trials programmatically, we'll now be taking a look at how to proceed if your trial users decide to go ahead and pay for their subscription.

This article is part of a series of tips and tricks that we post every week. Go ahead and check out our other tips and tricks, in case you missed them.

Moving subscriptions from Trial to Live

If your users signed up for a trial subscription via the hosted payment pages, then an invoice will be raised at the end of their trial subscription, for which they will be auto-charged (based on your payment gateway settings). Following this, their subscription will be changed from the Trial to the Live status.

If your users signed up for a trial subscription without providing their payment information upfront using the API method, as seen in the previous post, then their subscription will be moved to the Live status only when they've associated a payment method.

If you've configured the Trial About to Expire email notification, your users will be sent an email along with a link to update their payment details. If they still haven't associated a payment method by the time their trial ends, their subscription will move to the Trial Expired status.

You can also extend a user's trial programmatically by using the postpone renewal API, in case a user requests more time to evaluate your product.

Notifying your service about a trial's status

For SaaS based businesses, it's important that your application behaves according to a trial user's subscription status. This ensures that their access to your application is not cut off even after they've paid for a subscription.

This can be achieved by using Webhooks. To do this:

Go to Zoho Subscriptions > Settings > Automation > Webhooks.
Click + New Webhook.
Select the Subscription Activation event.
Configure the rest of the webhook based on your application's needs and click Save.

Now, this webhook will be triggered whenever a subscription has been activated, thereby notifying your application when a trial subscription has moved to Live.

We hope you've found this week's tip helpful. Do try it out and let us know how it goes in the comments below, we'd love to hear your feedback!

Cheers,

Varun Steven

The Zoho Subscriptions Team

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