What Is A Recurring Product?

A recurring product will form a sale that will automatically bill your customer at a specified interval. These types of products are typically used for such items as web hosting, membership services or “Item of the Month” type products. Recurring products can either be created in your 2Checkout account and passed in using the Plug-n-Play parameter set or they can be passed in dynamically using our Pass Through Products parameter set. If you need assistance with creating products, this article will help you.

What Types Of Options Can My Recurring Products Have?

2Checkout currently supports recurrence intervals that will allow the sale to bill your customer every week, month or year. You also have the freedom to set how many of the intervals must pass for the sale to bill. This means you can set a sale to bill every 1 week, 2 weeks, 8 weeks, 7 months or even every 2 years.

Recurring products must also be given a duration, or the total amount of times the sale will bill before it stops billing. You can currently set a recurring product to bill for any specified number of weeks, months, years, or this can be set so the sale bills forever until it is canceled.

By combining your interval and duration you can set a sale to bill for exactly how long you need it to. If you wish to sell a 6 week e-book subscription where you will deliver a new e-book to your customer and bill them every week. To set this up we would create a product that bills every 1 week for 6 weeks.

Recurring products can be both intangible product that require no shipping or tangible products which do require shipping. A tangible recurring product will be charged shipping on each installment that is billed. Shipping charges cannot be applied to intangible products.

If you need to add a charge for any reason you can set a start-up fee, which will be added to your products price on the first billing only. This start up fee will only be charged at the initial purchase. Setting a $10 startup fee would allow you to bill your customer, for example, monthly for $20, but charge the customer $30 the first billing.

You may also use a negative startup fee to lower, but not eliminate, the initial charge. Setting a -$10 startup fee would allow you to bill your customer, for example, monthly for $20, but charge the customer $10 the first billing.

Recurring products may be edited, but this will NOT effect current recurring orders for those products. Editing a recurring product will only effect orders placed for that product after the changes have been saved.

What Options Do I Have For Tracking My Sales?

Once a recurring sale has been placed, it can be viewed inside your 2Checkout account on its sale details page. This will show you each installment that has taken place, when it was billed and how much it was. It will also contain all your customer information and sale information just like regular non-recurring sales. If you need help finding a sale inside of your account, this article will assist you.

The “Declined Recurrings” report and the “Recurrings to Bill” report will help you track your recurring sales. The “Declined Recurrings” report will show you each sale that has declined and for what reason it declined. When a recurring sale declines your customer is sent an email notifying them of this and they are provided a link to update the billing information they have on file. Suppliers will also receive a copy of this email so they are aware that a billing was not successful. When a customers updates the billing information the sale will attempt to bill again. If the customer does not manually update the billing information the system will automatically attempt to bill the sale every seven days. The “Recurrings to Bill” report will show you the recurring sales on your account that are set to bill again and when they will bill.

Can I Automate Sales Tracking?

Using the Instant Notification Service (INS), you have the ability to receive information directly from 2Checkout to your website and any system you have in place when certain events occur.

To enable INS, you first need to build a script (or multiple scripts) that will be accessed by and will receive data from our server. The INS Documentation will assist you in developing this script.

Once you have your script(s) constructed, you will want to add them to the Notifications section, which can be found under the Account tab. Fill out the text fields with your script URL(s), making sure to enable each notification that you want to get sent to your script(s).

If you need to be notified when an order is created (recurring or not), you can use the “Order Created” message, which will be called shortly after a new order was placed through your account. This is similar to the Approved URL within your account settings, but it is *NOT* the same. The Approved URL setting can be used to pass the customer (along with data about the sale) back to that URL on your website, whereas the INS “Order Created” URL will be accessed in the background by our system after the customer is finished with their order. If you want your customer to be returned to a URL on your website after they place a sale, you will want to use an Approved URL. Otherwise, if you want to just receive data about the new order created, you can use the INS “Order Created” message.

Setting the notification URLs for recurring orders can be done using the last five notification items, and are as follows:

• Recurring Installment Success — The “Order Created” URL setting is called (if it is set) on the first time a recurring product is ordered. Then, this “Recurring Installment Successfully Billed” URL gets called every time the order successfully bills after the initial purchase.
• Recurring Installment Failed — Whenever a recurring order fails to bill, this URL is called. Failures will happen whenever a customer’s billing details can not be billed successfully. This typically happens when a customer’s credit card has expired, or if the customer does not have sufficient funds within their account.
• Recurring Stopped — This URL will be called when a recurring order was stopped before its recurrence length is finished. This URL will be called whether the supplier or a 2Checkout agent ends the recurrence on an order.
• Recurring Complete — This URL will be called when a recurring order successfully bills its final sale and the recurrence has ended. Keep in mind, you will receive an additional call from the “Recurring Installment Successfully Billed” along with a call to the “Recurring Complete” URL.
• Recurring Restarted — When a recurring product has been re-started from previously being stopped, this URL is called. This URL will be called when a 2Checkout agent re-starts billing on a recurring order.

Once you have these URL settings enabled, you will start receiving INS calls as soon as they happen. If you have any issues with the INS or you require assistance with the INS parameters, please don’t hesitate to open a support ticket in the Tech Support category.

How Can I Stop A Recurring Sale?

Recurring line items can either be stopped so that they no longer attempt to bill in the sellers area or by making a stop_lineitem_recurring call to our Back Office API.

To stop a recurring line item in the sellers area, you will need to access the sale detail page by clicking on the Sales tab, clicking the sale number to open the Sale Detail page and then clicking the Stop this recurring link located at the bottom of the recurring line item. Once this link is clicked, it will read “Recurring Billing Stopped” and the line item will no longer attempt to bill.

To stop a recurring sale through our Back Office API a username with API Updating access must make a call using the stop_lineitem_recurring method that specifies the line item id that the supplier wishes to stop the recurring billing on.

Once a recurring line item has been stopped, you will not have access to restart the recurring billing but a 2Checkout representative can restart the recurring billing for you with the customers consent. However, it is important to note that if a recurring billing is restarted it will bill the customer for all missed installments at a rate of 1 installment every 24 hours until the recurring billing has been caught up to the current billing cycle.

Customers can also contact 2Checkout.com to request the billing be stopped. You will be notified of such requests by email.