I'm having a hard time figuring out if Recurly supports a "products as a service" kind of business.
"Products as a service" has following characteristics:
No monthly fee
No charge upfront
Just charge the products itself
A subscription can have different products and different amounts
per product for each customer
The products or (amount of them) can change montly
For example:
A costumer can choose out of products A, B, C and D. He chooses to subscribe to our service and wants a montly delivery of a pack containing product A and 2 of product B.
After three months receiving this subscriptiopn he wants to change his pack. He deletes product A out of his pack and adds product C. The next delivery contains those products.
As far as I understand the API I have the following options:
Create a different subscription per user per "pack"
Seems too
complicated for managing all subscriptions. There will be many
subscriptions created and deleted (set on inactive, as deleting is
not possible). And it certainly isn't intended to be used this way.
Subscription plan of €0,00 with add-ons per product
Add-ons seem to be defined rather fixed when creating the subscription plan. I want my products to be flexible, taking them in and out of the subscription as I please. Doesn't seem to support that.
Metered billing
Also defined as usage-based billing. The proposed use cases in the docs all have a fixed subscription fee (which I don't want). They also add a defined and linear 'product' (eg. 0,1 / minute). Doesn't seem to fit my needs either.
How can I handle this kind of business best with Recurly?
A €0,00 with add-ons per product will be your best path forward. Add-ons are flexible and can be added/removed from a subscription plan as needed.
Related
I have a retail website built in Shopify Plus that is fed by an ERP. A couple times a month at least, I have sale events where some (not all) items get varying levels of discounts (I'll call this my store-wide sale), but my ERP doesn't have the ability to schedule temporary price changes.
I also have unrelated discounts that happen at the item level outside the store-wide sale cycle, so the solution needs to be able these to the store-wide sale price for that item and choose the lower of the two.
I can manually change all my prices with immediate effect in the ERP to start the sale and then manually do it again to put them back to the way it was, but that's time consuming, and normally needs to happen outside business hours. If I change the price in Shopify, the ERP just over-writes them.
Is this possible? Is there a solution short of implementing a PIM that will allow me to schedule my price changes in this way?
I was thinking of potentially keeping my store-wide discounts in a metafield and/or a tag on each item and using a script to do the math, pick the best price, and change the price at the line level in cart and maybe Javascript to over-write price displayed on the PDP and PLP to show that same price.
I realised a lot of merchants needed this, so I built an app for this. I'm sure it will do exactly as you need.
https://apps.shopify.com/simple-simons-price-scheduler
If you need additional features, just submit a request via the contact form. I'm pretty quick to implement features if I feel they're beneficial.
I am building a system that publishes products from our inventory to our eBay seller account. Everything is working fine, but I just keep thinking which call should I use when I update the quantity in our inventory.
RelistFixedPriceItem and AddFixedPriceItem both are working well, except that on eBay I will have same item with two different itemID, one is sold and one is active...
is that ok? Does it have something to do with eBay listing terms?
Any Advice?
Thanks
AddFixedPriceItem creates a new listing that does not include any data regarding the previous listing's statistics or sales data. RelistFixedPriceItem will create a listing for the product that does include the sales data from the original listing.
The eBay best match search engine uses a listing's sales stats as part of its algorithm to determine search standing. So if your original listing had a good number of views or sales, I would definitely recommend using ReslistFixedPriceItem. However, if your previous listings was stagnant for a long time without many views or sales, it might be more advantageous to use AddFixedPriceItem instead to give the listing a clean slate.
eBay is always changing their search algorithms, so there is no hard and fast rule here. You really just have to find out what works best for your particular products. Experimentation is key.
We process orders for multiple sellers (a typical "marketplace" scenario). Are there APIs or services that correctly compute sales tax for our use case?
I simply want to provide the sellers' (1 or more) locations and the buyer's location, and receive the correct tax rate to assess on the corresponding line item.
Most offerings I've evaluated (TaxCloud is one) seem to fall down in this use case.
I'm implementing a TaxCloud solution for a single-seller and multiple-buyer situation. You can utilize TaxCloud to determine tax cost by creating an account for each seller in the marketplace, configuring nexus for each, then using the appropriate API key/ID pair to lookup tax on items based on the seller.
Unfortunately, this means that you'll have to make multiple calls if the shopping cart has items from multiple sellers.
Soon I'll be working on a project that amounts to what is essentially an e-commerce app for configured products. This question is about ways to implement pricing schemes that can change from day to day, so we want to get the pricing logic out of code and into a database, but not in a way that causes the database to do all the work.
The basic idea is this, there are 5 attributes. You pick an option from each of those attributes. Then you start adding products to your cart. All the product you add will have those 5 attributes tacked onto them (the attributes will affect the pricing). Once you've added a product, you can apply modifications to it (the attributes will also be applied to the modifications).
So, what we've got at this point is a product (which has a fixed base price) with some information about it (that will modify the price), and zero or more modifications (which has a fixed price) and some information about them (which will modify the price). Modifications can also incur additional charges. For instance, if company A uses this software and they price their items using: BASE_PRICE + $50 * NUM_WHIRLIGIGS and the item has a modification that adds a WHIRLIGIG, that will have to be reflected in the price.
Do you know of any examples of different pricing systems that I might find useful when determining how to set this up? Do you have better ideas?
My current best thought is below, you can skip it if you're not curious about the particulars of the method and just want to get right to the answering!
For any given item (or collection of items) the company could use a special interface to set up pricing formulas which would then be interpreted and evaluated at run-time.
So for PRODUCT_A, the company might put in something like BASE_PRICE + WHIRLIGIG_UPCHARGE * NUM_WHIRLIGIGS. And the software, when it comes time to price it, would look at how many WHIRLIGIGS the item has, as well as how many WHIRLIGIGS are added by any modifications.
Does anyone have experience implementing this kind of interpreter? How did it turn out? Was it difficult/troublesome?
Thanks in advance for all the awesome input I'll sure I'll get. :P
Typically, this is usually handled with product bundles which have components. So a product with 5 additional subcomponents would not be base + 5 * addon, but SUM(base, addon, addon, addon, addon, addon).
So your product table may either be self-referential or there is some kind of link table which says which sub-products are allowed to be attached to which products.
In my experience, pricing is usually stored on a product/customer or contract basis, so that's another table.
Then the actual orders themselves contain product bundles. If the order is a quote, then the pricing is frozen (up to the expiration of the quote).
When an quote or order is turned into an invoice, at that time the pricing is either locked in from the main pricing or the quote, depending upon the pricing timing paradigm.
I've been researching eCommerce payment gateways and service offerings, but I'm an eCommerce novice, so please excuse my ignorance.
I wish to set up an eCommerce solution with the following requirements:
User "subscribes" to the service on a yearly basis. This service includes a single product subscription for a set amount (let's say $50/yr).
User can "subscribe" to additional product services for a lesser rate per year (let's say $25/yr).
I will need to store a product service unique Id of some sort for each product subscription the user subscribes to in order to show them product unique information. I also need to prevent duplicates...for example, user can subscribe to product ABC and XYZ, but not 2 of ABC.
Is PayPal the best solution for something like this? Is there a better solution? Any assistance is greatly appreciated, even if just links to specific tutorials or examples.
Update: It looks like Chargify could be the perfect solution.
You can also use Authorize.Net's CIM solution which, based on what I read at the chargify website, does most of what chargify does except your customers never need to leave your website. The Customer Information Manager allows you to create profiles for your members. These profiles store sensitive information like credit card numbers and billing information so you don't have to worry about PCI compliance or hackers stealing your information. You then can schedule a cron job to charge them monthly for whatever amount they owe based on their current subscription. Since you control when the payments happen it also allows you to charge them pro-rated amounts for subscription changes mid-month.
[link text][1] seems to be the best solution for me. I still need a merchant account, but this takes a lot of the headache out of handling the subscriptions.
[1]: http://chargify.com Chargify