Recurring billing / subscriptions with Instant Protection PLUS 3

It is possible to integrate the Periodic Activation feature of Instant Protection PLUS 3 with the automatically recurring billing engine functionality of SOLO Server's integrated eCommerce (PayFlow Pro payment gateway required) and provide your customers with uninterrupted access to your application via an electronic subscription service. SOLO Server can also automatically email the customer before it attempts to charge a credit card that would be past its expiration date.

• Follow and understand the Instant Protection PLUS 3 Recurring Subscriptions with SOLO Server tutorial to establish the initial license for the subscription period, set up the installment Product Option, and configure the payment plan.

Test the initial license to make sure the correct subscription period is assigned. From SOLO Server, select Store / Create a New Order/Cart and choose the Product Option which starts the initial subscription. Click the Create New Cart button and follow the instructions to test the ordering process. Note that Product Options with payment plans must be processed through the shopping cart.

Make sure the appearance of text on the pages meets your expectations. Also, be sure to verify that the correct number of days in the subscription period is assigned when you activate. When done testing, you can use a Reset Product License option Instant Protection PLUS 3 to start over as a trial.

To recap:

1. The customer will activate and the expiration date will be set to today's date plus the number-of-days value in the Days to D/L field  (from the Product Option screen).
2. The calculated expiration date will also be populated in the License Details page.
3. SOLO Server will set up the Payment Plan to charge their card the number of days specified in the waiting period of the Payment Plan. You should be able to see the Payment Plan instance attached to the customer record and see when the next charge will take place. This should occur a few days before the license expires so that it is seamless for the customer.
4. Because the server is set to retry, it will give a few days to resolve the issue with the customer before the software actually expires.

Recurring billing with FastSpring

If you are using FastSpring instead of SOLO Server's integrated eCommerce, you would not use Instant Protection PLUS 3 Periodic Expiration options in this case, but instead would rely upon the Background Checking Options to enforce expiring the license once the subscription is no longer being paid for, we strongly recommend setting a required validation. You would follow approach 2 as described here, which the result is that your software will periodically validate the Status field of the license in SOLO Server.

Your Product Option would need to use the following setting:

• Trigger Code #: 1 (or another non-expiring license type).

The License ID won't have a specific expiration date, as the license will remain valid as long as the customer keeps paying for their subscription through FastSpring.