Configuring a prepaid gift subscription

You may want to provide the option for customers to purchase gift subscriptions for friends and family. Normally, prepaid gift subscriptions are similar to the standard setup for prepaid products. However, you will want to set an expiration for the subscription to ensure that the original gift purchaser is not charged repeatedly for the gift subscription after the prepaid cycle is complete. This guide provides a walkthrough on how to configure a ruleset for a prepaid gift subscription.

Step 1 - Create your product 

Create your product through your eCommerce platform.

The price of your prepaid product should be multiplied by the number of prepaid months you plan to offer. For example, if you want to offer a 3-month prepaid subscription, and the product for one-month is normally priced at $20, you would want to set the product price at $60. This will ensure that customers are charged the amount upfront to cover the future prepaid shipments.

Products can only be added to one ruleset at a time. You will need to create multiple prepaid products through your eCommerce platform if you wish to offer different frequency and price options. For example, the three frequency options offered on this store represent three separate products hosted on your eCommerce platform:

Step 2 - Add products to Recharge

Products

1. Select Products from the Recharge Dashboard.
2. Select Add products.
3. Search for the products that you wish to add to Recharge. 
4. Click the check box beside each product you wish to add to Recharge and then select Add product.

Ruleset

1. Select Rulesets from the Recharge Dashboard.
2. Add a Ruleset name. 
3. Select Create ruleset to add the products to a new ruleset. 
4. Select Add products to add the product to Recharge. 

Step 3 - Create prepaid rules for the product

1. Choose pre-paid subscriptions only from the list of Subscription types.
   
2. Use the Order schedule to enter how often you will charge and ship your customers. For example, if you would like to charge customers once every three months for a product sent out monthly, you could update the Ship product every option to 1 month and the Charge customer every option to 3 months.

Optionally, you can choose when the subscription is submitted for shipment. By default, the product will be sent on the same day the initial checkout occurred, but you can also select a specific date.

Step 4 - Set the expiration

Set an expiration for the prepaid subscription so that it expires after a certain number of charges.

Enable the Set the subscription to expire after a set number of charges checkbox and enter 1 in the textbox. This indicates that the customer will be charged once for the entirety of the order and the prepaid cycle will not repeat.

Click Save when finished.

Shipping charges for prepaid gift orders

To ensure that accurate shipping is charged you may want to set the weight of this product to equal the weight of the individual product multiplied by the number of shipments that will be sent.