Recurring Products: Evaluate Discount Coupons again for next cycles

Hi Andrei,
Please consider the following scenario.

Use Case
Create a recurring order with first order discounted (say 1st order FREE).

Current Flow
1. Create a recurring product.
2. Create a discount coupon and set maximum number of usage to 1 time per customer and assign it to the product.
3. Place the order, discount is applied to the order. So far so good.
4. For next cycle, it just replicates everything including discount coupon, although maximum number of times discount coupon can be used is 1

Ideal Flow
.
.
4. While placing order for recurring cycle, validate the discount coupon and apply it only if it's allowed.

I hope I'm not missing anything that's already there.

Regards,
Anshul

Hi Anshul,

Thanks a lot! But there's no way to "fix" it because the payment fee should be the same (the original one and further recurring ones). In most cases payment gateways (plugins) won't support such behavior. So that's why we have to always use the original order amount.

The only think we can do is to add a hint to "Discount limitations" dropdownlist that it could be ignored when used recurring products. Here is a work item

Hi Andrei,
What you say is totally reasonable. However most of the time if not all, in case of recurring orders, the discounts are given only on the first order, just to make sure that customer starts the purchase.

So if we can evaluate discounts on first order and ignore on subsequent orders, this might work for most stores. A message can be shown somewhere on Discount editor screen that 'It's applied only for first order in case of recurring product' . As far as plugins are concerned, I saw PaypalDirect and WorldPay plugins and both of them allow to specify different amounts for first and subsequent orders. e.g. In paypal direct, SetupFee is being used for immediate payment, so this can be used. Similarly WorldPay SDK allow to specify different amount for first and subsequent request.

I think that'll make discounts more usable for recurring products as well. Very few stores would want to give same discounts on every recurring order.

Hope that makes sense.

PS. Paypal also allows to specify payment definitions as Trial, so that can be used for PaypalDirect plugin as well.

Done. Please see this commit for more details

RoastedBytes wrote:

Agreed.
The only workaround I've found is to offer a full or partial refund of their first month(cycle) of the recurring product...it's really pretty easy to pull up the order and click refund on any new orders that come in for your recurring subscription product...as long as your payment processor supports it.
Because you aren't affecting the actual "recurring order", the subsequent orders process normally.

Adding a hint that tells us that it works in a way that no one wants isn't really resolving the issue.  Nearly every single subscription service I use had a discounted first month, so I don't agree with the justification that the reason it works this way is because that is how the payment gateways work.

Is this on the roadmap or feature list anywhere to be addressed?  I definitely need discounts to only apply to the first month when I specific that they can only be used once so I'd like to know if I should start building that myself now or if there is a chance it will be a part of a future platform release?

On one site, we ended up taking the discounted amount and applying it as a price reduction on the recurring product...so instead of 12 months of $2 each, for example, we went with 12 months of $1.85 each..the savings is attractive to customers, though maybe not as much so as a 10% discount at the front end...