Subscription products

When a subscription product is purchased at checkout, a Subscription record is created for it which is where any recurring payments are managed from.

This topic covers the principles and configuration side of subscriptions, see Add a subscription product to skip straight to the procedure.

Compatible payment providers

Before setting a subscription product, make sure the payment provider(s) you use support recurring subscription payments. Not all payment providers do.

Subscription types

Evergreen subscriptions

Evergreen subscriptions continue until cancelled. They can be set up as monthly, weekly, etc. Each time a subscription payment is due, a new order is created in Salesforce that references the original order. Evergreen subscriptions are active until:

• Cancelled by the customer from their order history page in your store
• Recurring payment failure (account delinquency)
• Manually cancelled on the Subscription record

One-time subscriptions

One-timesubscriptions have a fixed number of payments required until they finish. Think of a mobile phone contract where you don’t pay upfront for the device. Each payment is added to the original order as a Payment record in Salesforce. One-time subscriptions are active until:

• The subscription is fully paid
• Recurring payment failure (account delinquency) results in manual cancellation of the Subscription record.

Generally, there are penalties for customer’s early exit of this kind of subscription. This is managed via the policies you set and that the customer agrees to.

(Salesforce CPQ users only) remove StoreConnect page layout fields

If you use Salesforce CPQ, you need to update your page layout to remove any StoreConnect subscription fields in the page layout. Once removed, you’ll just use the CPQ-provided fields.

For example, the fields Subscription Term, Subscription Pricing, and Subscription Type may appear twice, and you need to remove the StoreConnect field version.

To identify the StoreConnect field, move your mouse over the field item. StoreConnect field names have a prefix of s_c, as in s_c.Subscription_Term.

Subscription product settings

Products have several fields that are used to configure the product to work as a subscription. Each field is listed below with its configuration options.

Subscription pricing (required)

The pricing mode used. Currently only Fixed Price is supported in StoreConnect.

Subscription type (required)

This is the type of subscription term being used, currently Evergreen and One-time are supported.

Subscription term and subscription term unit

These fields define how often payment is taken for the subscription.

For example, a single month subscription might be:

• Subscription Term: 1
• Subscription Term Unit: Month

An annual subscription would be:

• Subscription Term: 12
• Subscription Term Unit: Month

Default Subscription Term Unit: If you don’t set a Subscription Term Unit, a default unit of 12 will be used. If you want to update this default, go to Custom Metadata Types in Salesforce Setup.

If using CPQ: The metadata setting must match the CPQ Subscription Term setting.

Subscription term count (one-time subscriptions only)

When configuring a one-time subscription product, you need to set how many times the customer is to be charged until the subscription is considered “fully paid” and therefore ended. This needs to include the first payment made at checkout.

For example, if a product is $1,000 and is paid at $100 per month, set the Price Book Entry List Price to $100 and the Term Count to 10. This means the customer is charged $100 a total of 10 times adding up to $1,000.

Subscription billing delay and subscription billing delay unit

Use these fields if you want additional time to make adjustments to a subscription amount, before billing. You might do this so you can include additional metered usage costs, or to provide credits, etc.

This is also helpful when your subscription product pre-pays for a service, and you credit unused service to the following term or the customer used above what the subscription covers. The delay gives you a chance to add the difference for the next payment.

A 3-day delay would be:

• Subscription Billing Delay: 3
• Subscription Billing Delay Unit: Day

Where Next Renewal Date is the 1st of the month, Next Billing Date would be the 4th of the month.

A delay of a month would be:

• Subscription Billing Delay: 1
• Subscription Billing Delay Unit: Month

This might be used on an annual subscription where the payment for the next year is charged a month into the year.

Renewal order days

For evergreen subscriptions, an order is created on each billing date and that payment is applied to that order.

You can set when the subscription order gets created, by entering a number of days in the Renewal Order Days field. The Salesforce order will then be created this many days in advance of the billing date.

You might do this because of how you report financially, to allow early payment, or for other business reasons.

Subscription behavior

Subscription behavior is about how you want to manage the subscription purchase transaction when you sell this product, and at the next billing event. For example, do you want to process the subscription and take credit card payments automatically? Or do you want to manage part or all of the subscription manually?

Related topics

• Add subscription products
• Subscription processing, payments, and renewals
• Manage subscriptions
• Manage delinquent subscription payments