If you deal with recurring profiles, then you know what a mess it can be to integrate those subscription products with all of your others for a seamless user experience. Everything is fine, until you try to add items to your cart. Right now, if your customer wants to purchase a recurring (nominal) product and something else, they have to check out twice. Twice.
With the attention span and patience of the online customer constantly shrinking, not being able to add items to their cart and having to check out twice puts a big dent in your potential sales. It’s likely that new customers coming to your site will assume they can easily buy what they want. If they’re cruising through your site trying to add items to their cart for purchase, you don’t want to put a roadblock in their way. Once they discover that they can’t add products to their cart and they also have to go through the process twice (or more!) to get what they what, they may just abandon their cart instead.
It’s like cruising down a high-speed highway and suddenly having to slam on your brakes to come to a complete stop for surprise construction or a traffic jam. It makes for a frustrating experience – once your customers are cruising down the conversion highway, the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to stop or exit.
Recurring profiles are good for customers and good for your business. They allow you to schedule orders in advance and maintain a consistent flow of sales. Plus, they’re an easy way for your customers to get the products they want, when they want them, and sometimes at a discounted rate. Because they are so good for your business, you can’t just write them off because of a potentially bad checkout experience. So, what do you do?
Custom development provides a solution – we’ve done it. With custom development, your customers will be able to add a nominal (recurring) product to their cart along with other items and check out. Also, you can add and check out with multiple nominal products, even if they have different schedules! This opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for your business. Here’s what you need to know to get started:
First, you need to know whether recurring profiles are right for you. If you sell items that are consumable and can be scheduled to be sold on a certain frequency, then recurring profiles can work for you. If there are any doubts, this post can help & will teach you how to set up recurring profiles in Magento. Usually, if you’re worried about carts and checkout with nominal items, you already know whether or not you need recurring profiles, but it never hurts to check before diving into a project.
Next, you need to decide what your business needs. Will you need recurring profiles to work with configurable products or with bundled products? Without custom development, they don’t; you would need to create a recurring product along with its schedules for each variation of the configurable product. But, with a custom development solution, they do work with both options and the process becomes much simpler for you and your customers.
Since the solution is custom development, each solution will need to be tweaked to fit each business’s unique needs. So, once you’re ready to move further into the process, these are a few questions that are helpful for your solution partner to know:
- Are you using a recurring profiles extension? If so, which one and what version?
- What is the product type and pricing structure of your recurring profile products?
- Will items be available both as a one-time purchase and a subscription item?
- Will the recurring scheduling always be the same? Or do customers need to be able to select the time period it renews on (15 days, 30 days, 45 days, etc.)?
- Will all items be on the same recurring schedule or will different products have different schedules?
- What kind of interfaces will customers need to manage their recurring product? Will it differ from normal recurring profiles?
- What version/edition of Magento are you running?
- Do you have a staging environment that is up-to-date?
- Who is your hosting provider?
Answers to all of these questions will help determine a development solution that is completely customized for you and your business. That’s definitely one way to stand out from your competitors!
If you have questions or are ready to talk about what a custom development solution like this can do for your business, send an email to magento@paradoxlabs.com or call 717-431-3330!
It’s your business, let us help you unleash it!