After the beta phase, here comes the first launch! Thanks to your returns, we are proud to release HikaSubscription!
Discover a new subscription system for HikaShop and Joomla!
Some of you know that since a long time ago, we wanted to provide a subscription system and we realized that HikaSerial was a really good base for such kind of component.
And so started the HikaSubscription story. After a successful beta period, we have improved the extension to add the most requested feature: The recurring payments.
Main features:
Plans & Subscriptions
After the packs and the serials from HikaSerial, you now can configure plans and subscriptions!
Even if the basis is almost the same, the way to configure the HikaSubscription Plans is not the same as the configuration of HikaSerial Packs.
You will be able to create plans, and you will be able to link HikaShop products to these plans in order for customers to be able to purchase these products.
That will in turn generate them a subscription (or renew an existing one) based on the conditions configured in the plan.
The biggest change between HikaSerial and HikaSubscription is regarding the actions.
For the packs, you needed to create a generator and configure the consumption plugins, but for plans, these are already available in the Plan configuration directly.
One other modification is related to the generation of Subscription data which are directly using the random generator.
A Subscription is quite similar to a Serial, but it has a start date and an end date.
Because a subscription can be renewed, it is not linked with a single order but with many (the one which started the subscription and the ones which renewed the subscription).
You will also be able to see a detailed history of the subscription.
Recurring payments
HikaShop did not have a full recurring payment interface for its plugins. That's why we worked on that specific task and we added recurring payment capabilities into HikaShop 3.2.2.
HikaSubscription now includes a recurring plugin: Paypal Recurring.
Thanks to this plugin, you can sell subscriptions which will be automatically renewed for the configured period of time.
The system can also combine recurring and non recurring products.
So if you have a cart with one subscription and other HikaShop products ; HikaSubscription will allow the customer to pay with Paypal Recurring his entire order and to start recurring payments for the subscription product.
Queue & Notifications
Because the subscriptions have an expiration, you need to have a cron task configured in order to perform automated jobs.
It includes the modification of the subscriptions (expiration, closure) and also the notification to the customers by email.
Like a mailing system, HikaSubscription will create a queue of the emails it has to send based on how you configured the email notifications for each plan.
Keep in touch folks.
Team HikaShop
