Allow payment via invoice instead of charging card on file for Subscriptions

[wyldbill]

When a customer received a payment notification for a Subscription, they are taken to a page to pay with a notice that their card will be saved and billed recurrently.

Since there is no advanced notice notice of when a subscription will renew (yet?), customers are often surprised when they receive a charge. We are routinely asked to retroactively cancel a Subscription and refund the charge. Since our Subscriptions prices are fairly substantial, and we currently have no way to warn the customer a renewal charge is coming, and cards are always placed on file and automatically charged, we feel that it's only fair to refund the customer. This is expensive for us.

Subscriptions HAVE the ability to send an invoice currently instead of charging a card on file.

Clicking a Subscription allows you to UPDATE the payment method, including sending an invoice by email.

While having to potentially cancel and unpaid invoice is no fun, it beats having to do a refund.

I may be looking at just using recurring invoices instead. This also has the advantage of the sorting, filtering and export which Subscriptions still lack.

[wyldbill]

It seems that at least one of Square's competitors offers both subscription reminders and the ability to send an invoice instead of charging a card on file. 

[jean_sq]

@wyldbill thanks for sharing your use case. To make sure I am following, since Subscriptions does not currently have a way to inform a subscriber that a charge to their card on file is about to occur, you would prefer to invoice them?

Depending on how you are creating the subscription, you can currently select "invoice" when setting up a new subscription. How are you currently setting up new subscriptions? Are you doing it through point of sale, through Dashboard, or sending a pay link? If you are sending a pay link, the customer does not have the opportunity to choose "invoice". If you set up the subscription either through your point of sale or through dashboard, you can choose "invoice"

Am I understanding your problem correctly? Thank you!

[wyldbill]

@jean_sq thanks for the reply. Apologies for not seeing it and responding sooner....

It's not about "preferring to invoice", it's about making sure customers know that they'll soon be charged a recurring fee. This functionality is very common for subscription services and missing from Square's Subscriptions.

While you can select "invoice" when setting up a Subscription, once a payment is made, it seems to save the card and subsequently charge the card on file.

We always set up through the Dashboard. We never use links, as they're even more limited and much less transparent to our customers.

Regardless of this, getting some sort of warning before the charge happens in order to provide the opportunity to cancel is critical. While some might argue that providing that option might result in more cancelations, dealing with the cost of manually canceling and refunding, the overhead and the customer frustration is worse than that potential.

As an aside, we've abandoned using Square's Subscriptions at this point. Problems like this one, the lack of ability to do filtering and basic reporting on Subscriptions, the inability to actually terminate a Subscription, and other issues have led us to find alternative solutions. I'd prefer to use a single, consistent platform, and may take another look at Subscriptions again in the future, but it's not fully baked enough for our use, and I haven't seen the progress or focus on it over the last several months to warrant waiting it out.

[jean_sq]

@wyldbill sorry for this delay - I missed your comment regarding "While you can select "invoice" when setting up a Subscription, once a payment is made, it seems to save the card and subsequently charge the card on file."

I checked with our team and that is how it is designed. If you choose "invoice", it will bill first payment by emailed invoice to collect the card on file. Subsequent billings will be by the newly captured card on file. Since the invoicing wording is confusing when creating a subscription, we will be updating it to make it more accurate.

Lastly, it seems that you are using the invoice method because Subscriptions does not send "heads up" messages to buyers prior to charging their card?

[wyldbill]

@jean_sq - Partly correct.

A "heads up" message would help in the case where the customer actually paid attention to it and responded. But folks aren't generally that reliable. Invoicing means they need to explicitly pay the amount. If they choose to save their card, that's fine and their choice, but having it automatically flip from invoice to card on file after the first payment isn't transparent, and results in "surprises".

Our subscriptions are expensive. If someone is charged "unexpectedly", they'll often want to retro-actively cancel with a refund. While we state that they're not refundable, the reality is that, for several reasons, it's best we keep the customer's good will by allowing them to retroactively cancel and provide a refund.

This used to just be a hassle, wasting CR time, but now that Square no longer refunds fees in a refund scenario, we lose an actual, non-trivial amount of money each time we run into this scenario, on top of the hassle and potential customer frustration.

Question for you: If I manually change the payment type on an existing Subscription from "card on file" to "invoice" does that "stick" or does it flip back to "card on file" once the next invoice is paid?

[jean_sq]

@wyldbill Thanks for the additional context. Even if you change it back to invoice from CoF, it will still flip back to CoF. The rationale for the "Send invoice" option for a subscription was for the circumstance where you were not able to capture the CoF initially so you send an invoice on the first bill to capture the CoF. There are no plans to add billing by invoice only for subscriptions.

If you wish to only bill by recurring invoice, would the recurring invoice feature of Invoices work better for you (instead of Subscriptions)?

[wyldbill]

We moved to recurring invoices several months ago for this and other reasons. It's not ideal, but works better for us in this scenario.

We're still migrating existing Subscriptions, which is slow as well need to contact each customer to let them know not to panic when they get the email indicating their Subscription has been canceled.

We're investigating another payment solution which may fit our model and systems better as well.