Introductory Service With Roll Over

[AllanD]

This feature request is for only allowing a Service to be ordered once by a customer and cancel at end of term.

 

 

Along with this "one time" service I'd like to be able to designate another Service for the "one time" service to roll over to and send the customer an invoice or auto debit.

 

This would work great for a trial service that rolls over to a paid service.

 

Here is how I would like to see this work:

 

• A Package/Group/Order form are created for the introductory service and roll over service. (The only difference between the two are term and cost)
• The introductory service could be a Trial with a predetermined term (2 weeks, 1 month, etc.) and $0 or a introductory (discounted) price.  It can either "Cancel at end of term"  or "Roll over at end of term". If "Roll over" the second service can be selected.
• When the customer selects the introductory service (trial) the service is provisioned.  Also credit card information is captured to create an account (in my case authorize.net with the customer data stored there) and  set up auto debit when the trial or introductory period is over.
• A Reminder Notice is sent to the customer before the end of trial that the introductory period is over and the Service will be charged to their card.

I think this could help sell a lot of new services for anyone using this billing system. Sales people would love it.

 

I've been trying to figure out how to get blesta to do this now without much success.

[serge]

+1 : Yes, it's an interesting request feature.

 

Close to that I found with the licence plugin/module , & when offering free trial licence, nothing prevent customer to order new trial licence by creating a new blesta account, imagine each time a trial licence is cancelled at term, customer create a new account & re-order.

 

I had to create my own cron to cancel trial licence using same domain, only the first ordered is the "legit"

[AllanD]

+1 : Yes, it's an interesting request feature.

 

Close to that I found with the licence plugin/module , & when offering free trial licence, nothing prevent customer to order new trial licence by creating a new blesta account, imagine each time a trial licence is cancelled at term, customer create a new account & re-order.

 

I had to create my own cron to cancel trial licence using same domain, only the first ordered is the "legit"

 

In my case the Order and Service is tied to a domain and the API is used to check if it has already been provisioned on the server.  So the user would have to enter a new domain to get the free trial again.  Detail: I added an option field to the service for the domain name and used vQmod to insert some javascript to check the domain against the server (a chat service) using API calls when exiting the field and returned a message that the domain is already in use or is available.

[Paul]

Please see CORE-504 which describes package switching. This is our proposed solution to free trials, or limited time discounts that roll over to another package. Any suggestions?

 

This wouldn't include reminders, which should logically be set up as part of another process or plugin. (Perhaps a conditional based email plugin? - Create email templates, set emails to be set to customers under certain conditions like Package XYZ renewing in X days.)

[AllanD]

I think "on renewal" rather than "Cancel at end of term" can work as long as the initial item and the new package can have different terms (2 weeks to monthly or annual). Or maybe there can simply be a "Switch at end of term" and when that is selected the list of available packages appears.

 

The only thing is this ties a trial to a specific package.  Would it be much more difficult to designate a package group and allow the prospect to select at order time?

 

A scenario:  There is one basic service with 4 different sizes/terms (so each could be displayed in a wizard box on the order page using the Universal module): 2 user monthly; 2 user yearly; 6 user month; 6 user yearly.  If a trial can only be associated with one package there would need to be 4 different trials for each of the 4 packages. If it could be associated with a package group, perhaps there could be a way for the user to select the "switch to" package and just have a general trial. 

 

Overall the "Switch at end of term" seems to take care of the flip from trial to paid service, but from a business perspective I would still like to see the ability to require a credit card capture to take place for a new customer on the order of the trial item even if it is $0.  Some may not agree with this approach but in certain sales situations this weeds out prospects that are not serious and changes the decision to purchase (already made) to a decision to cancel (the trial) if it does not meet their needs. Along with this it would be great to have an auto-debit on the renewal date for the new package. Then the new customer would need to do nothing if they want to keep the service.

 

I am not sure how these two features (CC capture and auto-debit switched product) need to be tied with the package switching or they should be set up separately.

 

The reminders may not be needed if the renewal approach is sending an invoice anyway.  They user would only need to act if they wanted to cancel.f

 

I still think this needs to go hand-in-hand with the "Single Purchase" idea so a user can not order a trial more than once.  A second package for an "Extended Trial" could be created if a specific prospect needs more time and the first trial cancelled.  But that would be a special situation.

 

Is the package switching going to make it into 3.5?

 

This is the biggest sore spot for our sales department at the moment.  

Thanks!

[Michael]

Is the package switching going to make it into 3.5?

 

Nope they are already working on 3.5

[AllanD]

What gets a feature into development for a point release?

[Tyson]

What gets a feature into development for a point release?

That depends on user demand, how useful we find the feature to be for Blesta compared to other features we have in queue, how much time we think it will take to complete, and whether it can be fit into our schedule for a particular version. We can't really be more specific than that until after the decision has been made.

[ldavies283]

+1 for this request for me too - I'm looking at the package switching however I regularly have to setup trials so would be beneficial

[Paul]

I moved this into our "short term" bucket, it's come up a few times.

 

CORE-504