Customer Notifications and Email Templates
Subscribe can automatically issue customer notifications at predefined moments in the billing cycle, using customized templates. Templates can be defined to notify merchants’ customers of billing events (imminent, in-process, successful, or failed), to submit invoices, to warn of a pending subscription expiration, to inform of an overdue balance, or to simply keep them informed of changes in their subscription plan. For more details, see Customer Notifications chapter in the Programming Guide.
For how to instructions of the email templates, see the Email Templates section of the How to guide
Subscribe allows merchants to optionally send email notifications to customers prior to an upcoming automatic re-billing. Merchants configure how many days prior to the billing day these notifications should be sent by specifying the prenotifyDays attribute in SOAP or the billing_notification_days attribute in REST on the billing plans object they create.
Thus until CashBox release 3.6.0, merchants could choose variable pre-notification periods based on billing plans only. Although most merchants who offer shorter (monthly, quarterly) billing cycles do not pre-notify their customers, merchants whose billing cycles are annual or longer are typically required by law to pre-notify their customers prior to upcoming billing.
Some US states have also mandated that these pre-notifications be sent to customers at least a specific number of days ahead of the billing day. For example, the US state of Illinois requires that merchants pre-notify their customers at least 30 days prior to the billing day.
To support such variable pre-billing notification requirements across various geographical regions Vindicia supports a feature whereby merchants can override the number of pre-notification days configured on a billing plan by individual customer address. For more details, see Specify Pre-Billing Notification Period Based on Customer Address in how-to guide.
This feature requires a special merchant configuration called CASHBOX_PRENOTIFY_ADDRESS (see table below), set to a value to either shipping or billing based on which address the merchant wants this override to work against. Add name value pairs to indicate which country and/or state Subscribe should override the pre-notification days configured on the billing plan and instead use the days as specified in the value of the pair.
For example: If for the state (Address.district) of Illinois (IL) in the (Address.country) US, the pre-notification should be sent 30 days prior to billing, then the name-value pair should be: CashBox:prenotifyDays:US:IL = 30
If for the entire country of France (FR) the pre-notification should be sent 45 days prior to billing, then the name-value pair should be: CashBox:prenotifyDays:FR = 45
If for the state (Address.district) of New Mexico (NM) in the (Address.country) US, the pre-notification should be sent 35 days prior to billing, then the name-value pair should be:CashBox:prenotifyDays:US:NM = 35
Note: the shipping address used here should be configured on the Account object.
The billing address considered here comes from the PaymentMethod object associated with the AutoBill.