Subscriptions

If you’re selling recurring services using Stripe you can cancel, upgrade and downgrade clients directly from SPP.

Go to Subscriptions, click on the subscription ID, then on the 3-dot action button.

admin view change client subscription drop-down

Upgrading and downgrading

Since a subscription can have multiple items in it, the admin’s upgrade page gives you more options for selecting which item to replace, and whether to prorate the charge.

SPP admin view change subscription

Changing the payment date

Say you include 5 articles per month in your package and a client runs through them all in 3 weeks. You could either…

  • Upgrade their subscription so next month they get more articles

  • Issue an invoice for any extra articles they need

  • Or trigger their next subscription payment now, resetting their limits and shifting the subscription payment date to today’s date. From SPP order details click the dots menu next to the invoice → Charge Now.

To shift the payment to a different date you’ll need to find the subscription in your Stripe account and add a trial to it to offset the billing date. SPP will still log the payment on the date it comes in.

Synchronizing renewal date

For some businesses it can make sense to charge customers on a specific day of the month for the balance they’ve accrued since their last payment. 

Let’s say you signed up for a website hosting account on the 20th of the month and they bill you on the 1st. Typically you’d get an initial charge for part of the fee since you can only use your hosting account for 10 more days before normally scheduled billing kicks in.

We’ve found that most productized services cannot be split that way – either it’s impossible to deliver whole month’s worth of service in ten days, or it isn’t practical to deliver a part of a service for the remaining days in the month.

For that reason this use case is not supported in SPP at the present time.

Self-service

SPP admin setting allow subscription self-service

You can give your clients the freedom to upgrade or cancel on their own. Of course, this depends on the services you sell and the commitments you require from your clients, that’s why this feature isn’t enabled by default.

To show the cancellation/upgrade links go to Settings → Payments and check the option.

Pausing a subscription

To pause a Stripe subscription, you’ll need to log into Stripe, find the subscription, and use the ‘Pause Subscription’ option.

To pause a PayPal subscription you’ll need to find the subscription in your PayPal account and click Suspend. Unlike canceled subscriptions. suspended subscriptions can be re-activated.

Cancellations

Stripe subscriptions can be canceled without leaving your SPP dashboard. Keep in mind that admins can choose to cancel a subscription right away, or at the end of the billing period. When a client cancels a subscription, it will end at the end of the billing cycle.

You can still log into your payment processor to cancel any other type of subscription. The subscription status will update in SPP, also triggering the “Recurring Stopped” tag on any orders from this subscription.