Knowledge center

Here’s a quick guide to help you setup a simple subscription store using ChargeBee.

Your requirement:

Let us say your service is delivering men’s socks to customers on a monthly basis at $x per month. During sign up, your customers get to select the size.

So your needs are:

1) Single product in different sizes

2) Fixed billing cycle

3) Size collected as input from customers

Solution:

There are two ways of proceeding on this:

1) Create a single plan

2) Create multiple plans

1) Create a single plan:

Since the plan’s billing cycle and price is fixed, and the only input that differs is the size, setting up a single plan is enough.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Create the plan in your ChargeBee site. To do this, login to your ChargeBee site, and go to Product Config > Plans > Create a new plan.

Step 2) Fill in the plan details, pricing and billing cycles details.

Step 3) Specify the setup cost, trial period or free quantity(if needed)

Step 4) Include the URL customers will be redirected after successfully subscribing to your service. You should use this success page to set expectations of delivery schedule.

Step 5) Once the plan has been created, note down the hosted page URL

Step 6) Request for the custom field to be created in your site (in this example the size) here. We will setup the custom field and inform you when it is done.

Step 7) Insert the hosted page URL (from step 5) into the HTML content of the Subscribe/Place Order button that is on the order page of your website.

Step 8) Provide an option (drop down or radio button) on your order page for your customers to select their size before they click on the Subscribe/ Place order button.

Note:The size value will be captured from your order page and passed the hosted page but will not be visible.Once the subscription has been created, the size will be displayed in the subscription details. Here’s more on how to pass custom field data to the hosted page.

Here is a demo:

2) Create multiple plans

Another way would be to create separate plans for each size. Setting up multiple plans will make it easier in case you need to track the number of subscriptions based on the size in your reporting.

Repeat steps 1 to 5 as explained above depending on the number of plans you have.

Step 6) Edit your order page’s HTML in such a way that on selection of a particular size, the page is automatically redirected to the respective plan’s hosted payment page.

Step 7) Javascript or just plain HTML can help you achieve Step 6

Note: The return URLs (configured in step 4 above) can be the same for all the plans that you create.

Here is a demo:

http://www.chargebee.com/labs/input-based-plan-demo.html