Some organizations want to charge members a monthly subscription fee instead of a one time fee at the beginning of signup. Zone4 does not have a built in subscription feature but this functionality can be achieved using a Helcim Commerce merchant account.
How to Create Subscription Plans
Once you have a Helcim Commerce merchant account, login to your Helcim account and on the left hand menu click Recurring. Then click Recurring Plans.
If this is the first time here, you won’t see any plans listed so click the New Plan button in the upper right.
Fill out the plan settings similar to as follows.
To setup monthly billing, set the Start date to the beginning of the current month and set the billing method to be ‘cycle’ with 1 billing frequency and “month(s)” for billing frequency type.
You likely only have one choice for currency and live terminal.
And you most likely want to set Initial billing to “Bill on First Cycle” as your Zone4 registration will charge the initial amount in order to capture their credit card details.
Finally leave the Initial amount blank and set the Recurring Amount to the amount of the monthly subscription. Note if you have different subscription fee amount, each one will need it’s own plan/sku which you can add easily.
Click the blue Create button in the upper right when done. You will now see that plan in your plan list.
Collecting Zone4 Entries
On your zone4 registration, you will collect the customer details, any othr non-subscription fees, and initial month’s fee to ensure you have an amount owing that will be billed to their credit card. Once the registrant has finished payment, you will see their Cart# in your registration reports. This Cart# will be needed to add them to your Helcim Subscription so you may want to make a report in Zone4 that includes the cart #, and perhaps an admin-only checkbox that you use to track those that you have added to the subscription plan.
Adding Subscribers to your plan
To add subscribers to your plan, login to your Helcim Commerce account and click Recurring -> Recurring plans. Click the plan and then click Subscribers on the right hand side.
In Subscriptions, you’ll see a list of all the people who are currently on that subscription plan. Click the New Subscriber button in the upper right corner.
Copy and paste a Cart# from your Zone4 Report into the Search Customer field and click on the corresponding customer. The information n the left will most likely stay as default so then just click the blue “Add” button. That’s it.
Note that this allows you some manual control over when to activate each subscriber and when their monthly charges should commence. You will want to put some description on your website and Zone4 registration that sets a policy for when subscriptions are billed and what the cut off date is for people to ‘join’ a given month before they need to wait till the following month. As you are capturing their first month fee on their initial signup via Zone4, you most likely will only visit this “Add Subscribers” page once a month to add any new ones for the subsequent month.