Increase Your Subscription Income With PayPal in Summer 2012

I just wanted to give you a sneak preview into plans for SubscriptionBoss over the summer months. My aim is to drive the plugin forward strongly, making it easier to use, easier to integrate with legacy PayPal agreements without having to cancel and restart them, and automate the process for adding new subscription products. The goal is to “set and forget” SubscriptionBoss and have the money roll in while you spend those longer summer evenings relaxing with family and friends.

So what’s in store? Well, SubscriptionBoss V2.0.

Payment Driven Orders

First up is the Payment Driven Orders feature which addresses two markets: firstly, migration of “legacy” PayPal subscriptions; and secondly, integration with third party systems where a service has been consumed and what you want to do is record the transaction within Infusionsoft to consolidate your customer and billing records.

The Payment Driven Order will create a contact if required, an order if required, an invoice if required, then add a payment and optionally run an action set. This is a zero cost way to migrate your existing subscribers on to Infusionsoft.

SubscriptionBoss Affiliate Program

SubscriptionBoss has now reached a level of maturity (it is 18 months old), so that it is ready to be sold through an affiliate program. With the latest release, which has integration with Infusionsoft order forms and the shopping cart, it now has very low entry and exit barriers and is now a real “no-brainer” for anyone offering subscriptions and payment plans through Infusionsoft. – and why wouldn’t you want to offer a payment plan using PayPal for your high value products?

In the coming weeks I will email all SubscriptionBoss users to offer them the opportunity to become affiliates.

Discounting And Multi-Rate Agreements

The Infusionsoft API offers a new Discount Service. SubscriptionBoss will provide integration so that it will be possible to set up a trial period at a different monthly rate from the final monthly rate.

This will allow you to do interesting payment options like ‘buyout options’ where you say offer a package of $497 initial cost then after 6 months offer a rate of say $97 a month for 6 months then you offer a reduced rate of $47 a month or a lifetime membership for say $997. This can be offered under a single PayPal agreement so if the member does nothing they move from the $497 initial charge, to $97 a month, then to $47 month without having to change their agreement. If they take action the $47 a month is cancelled and you receive the $997 one time payment. Of course, you can configure other amounts, billing periods, frequencies and the delays between changing from one rate to another.

Automated Subscription Setup

I will drive automated subscriptions set-up forward in two ways. Right now, I think I will have to address both the following approaches however my understanding is continually being increased as new customers sign up to SubscriptionBoss and have different modes of operation.

First Approach: AutoConfiguration Wizard

SubscriptionBoss looks into Infusionsoft and automatically sets up SB subscriptions for all products, products plans and subscriptions. When the wizard has run, you will then be able to tweak the settings if the wizard has missed stuff due to badly named action sets, say, or because you have simply decided to change what needs to happen.

Second Approach: Zero Admin

With this approach there is NO setup in SubscriptionBoss for each product/subscription; everything is configured in Infusionsoft. This will rely on the implementation of a naming convention within Infusionsoft so SB can determine what action sets to invoke in the case of order success, order failure, cancellation, payment failure, refund, etc. It will also require a number of custom fields for items such as confirmation pages, PayPal custom styles, outstanding billing preferences, etc.

So for example, if you specify a querystring to SubscriptionBoss of c43p21x3p94 that means the order is 1 x SubscriptionPlanId 43, 3 x ProductId 21 and 1 x ProductId 94. SB will make one order for each subscription and a second order for the products.

The two approaches will be mostly functionally equivalent; it is more a matter of personal taste as to whether you prefer to perform the setup on WordPress or in Infusionsoft. The first approach will offer more flexibility at a cost of slightly more maintenance. If you like ‘explicit’ go for the former approach; if you like ‘implicit’ go for the latter.

SubscriptionBoss Price Rise

SubscriptionBoss will increase in price for new customers to reflect the increase in value and functionality. Existing customers will be grandfathered in at the monthly subscription rate at which they signed up.

So if you read this before the release of SubscriptionBoss v2.0 I suggest you sign up to benefit from the current price and from the upcoming features that will be delivered over the summer months.

Leave a Reply