With sticky.io's Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge, you have the freedom to create compelling prepaid offers that help you capture more revenue at the start of a subscription chain. You can opt to leverage these offers to extend percent-based or flat amount discounts to consumers based on the number of orders they choose to pay for up front.
In this article, you and I will take a deep dive into understanding what prepaid offers are and how to create them using the sticky.io cartridge.
The following articles will walk you through the process of creating standard or seasonal offers.
Step 2C — Creating Seasonal Offers
Without further ado, let's begin!
Prepaid Offers Explained
With Prepaid offers, you can allow consumers to prepay for a specified number of orders for a percent-based or flat amount discount.
An example prepaid offer might allow consumers to prepay up front for six total orders in exchange for an additional 10% off their purchase.
This is useful to incentivize longer subscription commitments and keep consumers with your business for longer periods of time.
It is important to note that by default with prepaid offers, shipping will be charged on the standard subscription cadence. Shipping can be configured to be prepaid as well (base shipping cost x number of cycles).
Creating a Prepaid Offer
Now let's walk through the process of creating a Prepaid offer.
To begin, we'll start by logging into our Salesforce Commerce Cloud Business Manager and selecting the site of interest.
Next, we will open up the Merchant Tools dropdown. Within the sticky.io section, we will select Offer Configuration.
Here, you'll be able to see information about your created offers with the capacity to sort by offer name, type, prepaid status (Y/N), recurring type, trial status (Y/N), expiration status (Y/N) and the date of the last update.
Next, we will open up the Actions dropdown and select Add to create a new billing model.
Select an offer type from the on-screen dropdown menu.
For this example, we will select a Prepaid offer.
Select the billing models that you would like to associate with your offer by checking the corresponding boxes with the Add Options submenu.
For this example, we will create a prepaid offer using our 30-day subscription billing model.
Adding Products to Prepaid Offers
Next, we will select products to be included in our offer.
We'll start by locating the Products field on the offer configuration page.
Next, we will click the light blue + sign to select individual products to be included in our offer. Use the search bar to select your products of interest.
For this example, we will apply the created offer to two products in our sample product catalog.
We can also apply a subscription billing model to every product in our catalog by clicking Select All. Conversely, we can reverse this using the Deselect All button.
Recurring Types
Finally, we will select the Recurring type of our Prepaid offer.
When Self Recurring is selected, the product passed in the initial purchase will be the product that is rebilled and sent every billing cycle.
When Custom Recurring is selected, you are able to define a different product to be received for each billing cycle.
We can specify products for inclusion in the subscription chain by adding next cycle products and specifying which products to include.
For example, after our initial product is shipped, we want the following cycle to include a Soothing Daily Moisturizer with Aloe for our consumers.
Prepaid Configurations
Within the Prepaid field, we can specify the number of orders that customers can prepay for and the discount they will receive. Simply use the on-screen fields to specify your desired offer terms.
An example offer is pictured below where consumers can prepay for 6 orders for a discount of 10% off. Consumers will be billed up-front for 6 orders at once, but will be shipped their orders according to our defined schedule. In this case, the offer is associated with our 30-day billing model so consumers will receive their orders every 30 days.
As the merchant, you can choose what happens after the prepaid term ends. Available options are pictured below:
If you elect the Renew the subscription - bill prepaid amount and continue shipping option, the prepaid chain will repeat exactly as it was started. Consumers will be billed the same amount they were billed at the start of the chain and their shipments will continue on the specified schedule.
With this option, shipping can be configured to be prepaid (base shipping cost x number of cycles). By default, product costs are paid upfront, but shipping charges are applied and charged with each newly shipped order. This offer can also be configured to charge the initial shipping price on renewal.
If you elect the Renew subscription - convert to standard offer option, the prepaid chain will terminate after the specified numbers of shipped orders and convert to a standard offer. Consumers will be charged the regular product price and will be billed and shipped product on your specified schedule.
With this option, shipping can be configured to be prepaid (base shipping cost x number of cycles). By default, product costs are paid upfront, but shipping charges are applied and charged with each newly shipped order. This offer can also be configured to charge the initial shipping price on renewal.
If you elect the Stop subscription option, the consumer will no longer be billed and will no longer receive shipments after the prepaid subscription chain ends.
With this option, shipping can be configured to be prepaid (base shipping cost x number of cycles). By default, product costs are paid upfront, but shipping charges are applied and charged with each newly shipped order.
As the merchant, you can also choose how to handle cancellations on prepaid orders.
By default, cancellations will result in the remaining shipments staying active, but the subscription chain will be placed on hold after the end of the prepaid term. Alternatively, cancellations of prepaid subscriptions can result in the cancellation of the remaining shipments. With this selection, refunds must be applied manually.
You will have the option to decide whether or not to send order notifications on $0 prepaid orders.
Lastly, you can decide whether or not to allow refunds on prepaid orders. By default, refunds are allowed.
Once satisfied with our selections, we will Save to preserve them.
Congratulations! You're now an expert on creating prepaid offers with the sticky.io cartridge for Salesforce Commerce Cloud.