Subscriptions are a great way for your customers to purchase bus tickets through a continuous payment authority from their credit or debit card.
Creating a subscription plan
- Log on to the Passenger Cloud, select the 'Tickets' tile and then the subheading 'Subscription Plan' on the left-hand side of the screen.
- Click the 'Create a subscription plan' button and select the ticket you wish to create a subscription for.
- Complete the required fields of plan 'Title', 'Frequency' and 'Period' of payment and 'Subscription Price'.
Some things to note here are that 'Frequency' and 'Period' sets the schedule of how often the subscription plan will purchase another ticket, which can have the same validity as the ticket being purchased or be different. The subscription price can be the same as the ticket being purchased or can be specifically set up differently for the subscription, to incentivise customers to sign up.
Once a subscription plan has been created for a ticket, it will be displayed on any sales channel selected for the ticket in question, i.e if you have the Web2mobile functionality, and selected web as the sales channel for a ticket, then the subscription plan will be available for customers to purchase on your website.
The ticket must be 'Available for Sale' for the subscription plan to display in mobile apps. Subscriptions are not available on travel portals.
You can create multiple subscription plans for individual tickets so when the customer selects a ticket which has more than one subscription plan, they will be presented with a list of options like the example shown below.
Managing a subscription plan
Once a plan is created, you can manage the subscription in the same area of the cloud. By selecting a plan, you can edit the price or remove the plan from sale.
If you update the price of a subscription, any new customer will pay the new price but existing customers will not be charged the new price until the next payment cycle. If the price change comes during an existing customer's current billing cycle then the new price would be reflected in the subsequent one. An example of this would be if a customer's payment comes out on the 10th of May and their 28-day subscription plan changes in price on the 12th of May, the customer would be charged the old price 28 days from the 10th of May but would be charged the new price the payment cycle after that.
If you remove a plan from sale, this will prevent new customers from purchasing a subscription but any active subscription will remain.
You can still access a removed subscription plan on the Passenger Cloud by switching tabs on the main subscription plan page to 'Unavailable for Sale' and selecting the desired subscription. From here you can either make the subscription available for sale again or permanently delete it. By permanently deleting a subscription plan, you are cancelling any active subscription but customers will retain any tickets they have already purchased.
Customers can cancel their subscriptions by logging into their account on your website or app. You will also be able to cancel individual customers' subscriptions via their customer profile on the Stripe Payment system. Upon the subscription in question, shown near the top of the customer's profile page, three buttons will be shown; a black pencil symbol, a black "X" symbol and three dots. Use the black "X" to cancel the subscription.
Customers may only change the payment information used for their subscription plan by cancelling the current plan, and starting a new one with the desired payment information.
If you have any further questions on subscriptions, please contact your customer success manager or our helpdesk.