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How to Setup Magento Recurring Profiles

Sites that sell consumable products have a great opportunity to drive sales using recurring payments. Magento’s recurring profiles allow a store to schedule orders in advance. Giving a discount for a guaranteed sale isn’t for everyone, but it is an option available to you as well.

Magento’s recurring profiles (or recurring payments) use PayPal to schedule orders in advance. There are also third party extensions that use tokenized payment gateways to perform the same function, such as our Authorize.net CIM Recurring Payment, BluePay Recurring Payment and FirstData Recurring Payment extensions.

Magento recurring payments make sense if you sell products ranging from skincare to pet treats—items that are consumable and can be scheduled with a certain frequency. We’ve all heard of the book of the month clubs. Magento recurring profiles is the same concept. Each sale is billed and invoiced separately, so there is no need to worry if a payment has been charged successfully. Most third party extensions will allow the ability to edit payment methods while a recurring profile is in progress.

The process of setting up a Magento recurring profile is straightforward. The key to understanding them is knowing when they can and cannot be used. It’s a pretty simple rule: only Magento simple products can be used for recurring profiles.

To set up a recurring profile, first create or edit a simple product in Magento. If you are using version 1.4.1 or higher, you will find a tab on the left side labeled ‘Recurring Profile’.

Set Enable Recurring Profile to Yes.

Magento Recurring Profile Schedule Settings

Setup the schedule of the payments. There are four settings in the schedule.

1. Customer Defined Start Date: Do you want to allow the customer to set the start date? If so, set to yes. Otherwise, set to No. If set to No, the start date is the date of purchase.
2. Schedule Description: Provide a nice human friendly short description. This is shown on the customer facing side. The user will see this when they order the product.
3. Maximum Payment Failures: Do you want to allow payment failures? If you do, set the number of payment failures. If not set, the profile will cancel itself on the first failed payment.
4. Auto Bill on Next Cycle: If set to Yes, Magento will attempt to charge the card for the number of missed payments the next time it attempts to create an order. If set to No, each time the recurring profile fails, the subscription will be elongated by the Billing Period Unit (more on that soon).

Magento Recurring Profile Billing Settings

Each Magento recurring profile has billing settings. These tell Magento how often and when a profile will be purchased.

1. Billing Period Unit: What are the units we’re billing by, Days? Months? Years?
2. Billing Frequency: How many billing period units are in the recurring profile. If the idea is to create a yearly subscription, then you would enter 12 for the frequency and Month for the period unit.
3. Maximum Billing Cycles: is there a limit on how long the recurring profile will continue. If this is empty, the recurring profile will only end when the user or an administrator cancels the profile.

Magento Recurring Profile Trial Period Settings

The ability to setup a trial period gives marketers the ability to discount their product without lowering prices—a ‘Buy 12 months and get the 13th free!’ type of deal. Magento allows the customer to cancel a recurring profile at any time. Offering a trial period should be used cautiously.

1. Trial Billing Period Unit: What is the billing unit you wish to give away?
2. Trial Billing Frequency: How many periods are contained in the trial? This can be set to any number.
3. Maximum Trial Billing Cycles: When will the trial billing cycle end. Will it happen once? Twice? Is it never ending?
4. Trial Billing Amount: What is the amount you wish to charge? If the monthly recurring profile is $10, entering $5 has the effect of offering the trial period at a discount of 50%.

Magento Recurring Profile Initial Fees

A marketer may add a one-time initial fee to the recurring profile. This would be useful for situations where there is some setup overhead involved when the order is initially placed. For instance, you might charge $50 on a monthly basis, plus a $200 one-time setup fee.

1. Initial Fee: The additional fee to be charged on the start date of the recurring profile. This fee is NOT recurring. It will be charge only one time during the life of the recurring profile.
2. Allow Initial Fee Failure: If yes, the recurring profile will continue even if the first payment was unsuccessful. It may be a good idea to leave this ‘no’ to immediately suspend the recurring profile.

For those running Magento 2, we also offer an Adaptive Subscriptions extension to give your store the power of subscriptions, auto-shipments, and recurring billing. Visit our Store to view all of our available extensions.