If you are using X-Payments Cloud to process payments in your X-Cart store and have a payment configuration based on a payment gateway integration with support for tokenization, you can sell products and services with recurring payments. This feature is called Subscription Management, and it can be enabled in the "Store Settings" section of your X-Payments Cloud Connector add-on settings.

Enabled Subscription Management adds a new type of products in X-Cart that is called subscription products. A subscription product is a product model that enables a customer to pay to have access to a product or service as a subscription and get billed on a recurring schedule.

For example, if you are selling beauty products, you can provide your customers with an opportunity to purchase a beauty box subscription and have a box of beauty products delivered to their door every month. In this case, you will need to configure a subscription product "Monthly Beauty Box" (or similar) and publish it in your store catalog. The product will have a set of subscription related properties defining how often to bill a customer who purchases the subscription, in what amount and for how long, whether there should be a subscription setup fee, a free trial period, etc. A store visitor will be able to add this product to their shopping cart separately or along with other products. During checkout, a subscription will be set up automatically that will allow X-Payments to bill the customer according to the subscription settings you have specified for the product. For a more detailed explanation, see the section Subscription Example further in this article.

To enable Subscription Management:

This enables Subscription Management and enables your store to sell subscription products.

Please note that there are some general settings for Subscription Management in X-Payments Cloud General Settings (in the section "Subscriptions"). Be sure to check and adjust them.

Once you enable Subscription Management, the product details page in your X-Cart store gets an additional tab: Subscription Plan.

By default, the Subscription Plan section that you can access via this tab provides an only setting - "This is subscription product". This setting enables you to specify whether the product is a subscription one or not.

After enabling Subscription Management, you will need to check and adjust this setting for each new product you create. For any product that you are going to sell as a subscription this will need to be set as "This is subscription product = YES".

Please note that simply enabling Subscription Management does not change the product type of any existing products in your store, which means that if you have any regular, non-subscripion products in the store catalog they remain that way. If you want to change the product type of an existing product so it becomes a subscription product, you will need to visit the Subscription Plan section of their product details and reset the product type property "This is subscription product" to YES.

For each subscription product, you will also need to specify the details of its subscription plan (the subscription schedule, duration, etc.). After readjusting the position of the "This is subscription product" switch to YES, you will be provided access to more settings on the same page. Use these settings to configure the product's subscription plan. See the section Configuring a Product's Subscription Plan below for details.

Generally, the management of subscription products is not much different from managing other types of products. They can be edited, deleted, cloned, exported, imported, etc.

For your convenience, in X-Cart stores using the X-Payments Cloud Connector add-on the product filtering facility in the Products section provides a setting that enables you to filter and find products based on whether they are subscription products or not. To access your filter settings in the Products section, click on the down arrow tab of the product search/filter bar at the top of your product list.

The setting for subscription search is named "Display subscription products", and it allows you to select the search option you require:

To configure a subscription plan for a product, you need to adjust the following settings on the Subscription Plan tab of the product details:

All your customers' subscriptions can be found in the X-Payments Subscriptions section of your X-Cart store's Admin area (Orders > Subscriptions List).

In this section you can view all the subscriptions as a list as well as access some tools for subscription management. For example, it is possible to view and adjust the subscription status (Active / Not started / Stopped / Restarted / Failed / Finished), choose a different customer shipping address, or choose a different customer payment card.

For example, we want to set up a subscription product that will allow buyers to have a box of beauty product samples delivered to their door every month.

In our X-Cart store's admin area, we create a new product - "Monthly Beauty Box".

After specifying and saving the basic product details (such as the product name, SKU, images, etc. - all that goes on the Info tab of a product details page), we switch to the Subscription Plan tab. There we set the product's subscription related properties. For example, we need the price of one box to be set at $24.00, and we want our subscribing customers to be able to get one box every month. We also want to add a setup fee of $5.00 (it will be charged only once per subscription). So we configure the subscription plan settings as follows:

We do not want to limit the number of customers that can purchase the subscription, so we go back to the Inventory Tracking tab of the product details (or the Info tab - the setting is available in both places) and make sure the inventory tracking feature is disabled for the product.

Since each beauty box is a tangible object of certain physical dimensions and weight, we also revisit the Info tab to configure the Shipping settings for the product.

This will enable the calculation of shipping cost for each beauty box being sent out on this subscription according to our Store Setup > Shipping settings.

The resulting product page on the storefront will be as follows:

When someone chooses to purchase this product, all the relevant information about the subscription order will be provided to them on the shopping cart page and during checkout, including:

Cart page:

Checkout (Payment):

The customer will be able to pay for the order using a new payment card or a payment card stored in their customer profile.

The order invoice will also provide all the relevant details.

At the time of payment for the first subscription order, the process of tokenization will be involved to link the payment card that was used by the customer to the current subscription; this will enable X-Payments Cloud to initiate further billings of the same card on the current subscription - in full compliance with PCI DSS requirements.

After one month, when the time comes for the following subscription payment, the customer's payment card associated with the subscription will be billed again, and another order will be generated automatically (this time without the setup fee, as setup fee is charged only once).

The same will happen for each subsequent payment period throughout the subscription duration.

Every time the customer's card is billed, an order invoice will be created, which the customer will be able to access as usual via the Orders section of their account details.

The customer will be able to view their subscriptions as a list in the My Subscriptions section of their account details.

This section provides the customer with the essential information about their subscriptions and with the tools to manage them. For example, the customer can change the payment card they are using for subscription payments or stop a subscription.