Chapter 16. Recurring Billing

Table of Contents

Payment Schedule
Subscription
Using a Payment Gateway that supports Recurring Billing
Insert a subscription
Update a subscription
Read the status of a subscription
Manual Subscription Management
Managing Recurring Billing through KonaKart

KonaKart provides support for recurring billing which may be implemented in one of two alternate ways. The actual payment transactions may be performed by a payment gateway that supports recurring billing, or they may be performed by a KonaKart batch program that interfaces with the payment gateway to make the regular payments. We recommend the first approach since it doesn’t require that you store sensitive credit card information within your local database. The credit card details are transmitted to the payment gateway so that it can create the subscription and automatically make the payments at predefined intervals.

There are two main objects within KonaKart that provide recurring billing support. These are the Payment Schedule object and the Subscription object. Both have dedicated panels within the Admin App so that they may be managed. The Payment Schedule panel may be found under Products, whereas the Subscription Panel may be found under Orders.

Payment Schedule

A payment schedule defines the frequency of payments for a product as well as the total number. i.e. Payments may be monthly, lasting for two years. In the case of monthly payments, it allows you to define the day of the month the payment should be made. It also allows you to define one or more trial payments which may be for a different amount. i.e. The subscription may consist of monthly payments of $9.99 for the first 6 months before increasing to $30.00 .

A payment schedule is associated to a product. This is done in the Edit Product panel. A drop list containing payment schedules will appear in the Details tab of the Edit Product panel if one or more payment schedules exist. When an order is confirmed by a customer during the checkout process, the products within the order are examined to detect whether any of them have an associated payment schedule. If a payment schedule is found, this triggers off the process of creating a recurring billing subscription.