Yes, Chargify gives you the ability to upgrade or downgrade a customer’s subscription in the middle of a billing period and collect prorated charges or give prorates credits.

What happens when I upgrade or downgrade a customer’s subscription?

• Prorated credit: A prorated credit can be created to reimburse the customer for their current product.  A prorated credit must be at a minimum $0.01.  Regardless of how long your customer has had the product, even if only for a few seconds, proration will result in a minimum charge for that time of $0.01.NOTE: This is NOT a refund, no money will actually be returned to the customer, as a credit only effects the customer’s balance.
• Charge: A charge for the full amount of the new product will be applied.
• Updated period start/end dates: The period start date will be reset to the day you upgrade or downgrade your customer’s subscription.

How Do I Initiate an Upgrade or Downgrade?

When in the admin interface, click the subscriptions tab and then click the “upgrade/downgrade” link under the subscription options section.  This can also be done when viewing a subscription by selecting the “upgrade/downgrade” link under the summary section on the left of the screen.

Chargify allows you to create one-time coupons to give customers a discount on signup.  After the coupon is applied, customers will be charged the normal amount at the next assessment.

Currently, coupons can only be used during the initial creation of the subscription and cannot be used during or to extend the free trial period. However, you can extend their free trial period by changing the assessment date for their current subscription.

To change the assessment date for a customer’s current subscription, find the subscription that you want to extend then:

Yes, Chargify supports a metered billing pricing model.  Chargify gives you the ability to charge for your product on a per-usage basis. 

For metered components, you tell us every time one of your customers uses some unit or units of your “widget”. The usage of these metered components will be tallied throughout the billing cycle and the charge is seamlessly integrated as a line item on your customers’ next invoice.

At the end of the billing period, Chargify will bill your customer for the total number of widgets used, and then we will reset the widget count to zero and the whole process starts over for the new billing period.

Last week’s top support question was, “Can old customers stay on old pricing if the merchant changes their product prices?”

In short, the answer is yes, old customers will always stay on old pricing, even if you change the product pricing. Although the short answer is simple, there are a few more things we would like to address in this post that we think are important for you to be aware of, as they relate to merchants changing their product pricing.

Will my customer’s next subscription fee be at the new price?
When you change the pricing of your product, your current customers will continue to be charged the old price unless you move them to the new “product” (new price level).  New subscribers, after the price change, will be charged the new price.  This is called product versions, when you have the same product just at different prices.

Do customers need to approve the new price?
Yes, since you would have to move them from the old product (old price) to the new product (new price), you would need to get your customer’s approval and then move them via the API or the administrator interface.

Where Can I Get Someone to Help With My Chargify Integration, API Work and Programming?

Last week’s top support question was, “Where can I get someone to help with my Chargify integration, API work, and programming?” The answer to this question is simple.

If you are unable to implement Chargify yourself, we have put together a list of consultants who have done work for other Chargify merchants.  They are all independent contractors and are located around the United States and Canada. You can find a list of consultants, their specialty, and notes about each contractor to help with your decision at http://Chargify.com/Consultants. We only include consultants we know & trust.

This past week our top support question was, “What is a free customer?”  Chargify’s pricing plans are based off of the amount of paying customers you have, so it is important to understand the difference between a paying customer and a free customer, as it affects the amount we charge you each month.

What constitutes a free customer?

A free customer is one that has not paid you for the current month we are billing for.  A common point of confusion on this is when someone pays you once a year for a subscription.  If you charge a customer’s card once a year, they are not considered a free customer for the other 11 months they are not billed because they have already paid you for those months.

What constitutes a paying customer?

A paying customer is one of your users who paid you for the month that we’re billing you.  If you charge your customer $10/month, every month, then we’re going to count them in your paying customer count each month that we bill you. If you charge them once, for a whole year, we’re still going to count them in your paid customer count each month, because they paid you for those months.

This past week our top support questions was, “What is a merchant account and payment gateway and how do they work with Chargify?”  This is a great question and it is important for Chargify customers to understand what they are and how they work together with Chargify.

What is a merchant account?

A merchant account is a type of bank account that enables businesses to accept payment by debit or credit cards.  A merchant account is necessary because it’s what allows you to accept recurring credit card payments from your customers. Before you can even begin using Chargify, you will need to set up a merchant account. (You can however test Chargify without having a live merchant account/payment gateway with the developer plan.)

What is a payment gateway?

In order to get paid, you will need a payment gateway.  A payment gateway facilitates the secure transfer of information between your website and your merchant account.  Your payment gateway will transmit your customers’ billing information to your merchant bank so that payments can be deposited into your internet merchant account each month.

Since last week was Thanksgiving, the volume of questions that came into our support center was low.  We figured for this week instead of doing a top support question, we would do an overview of our hosted pages to address some questions that we have been receiving over the past few weeks.

What are hosted pages?
Chargify offers a hosted/white label signup page for all of our customers. The hosted page allows you to integrate with the Chargify platform without having to worry about collecting credit card information or writing custom code yourself. You can point your customers to a unique URL on the Chargify site and we will securely handle subscription signup and payment processing.

Customizing your hosted pages
Chargify allows you to customize these hosted pages so that they are company specific and meet your individual company’s needs.  You can customize:

• Page title
• Company logo
• Add custom CSS and Javascript
• Custom links
• Enable and disable the coupon option
• Select which credit card logos appear

Last week, we officially changed the Chargify pricing.  With these changes, more merchants were required to update their credit card information or put a credit card on file.  This resulted in last week’s top support question, “Why is my credit card getting declined?”

Answer: It can take Chargify up to 12 hours to update a merchant’s card on their account and until that time merchants may still receive messages in regards to their declined credit card.

There are two ways to resolve this issue, one better than the other.

1. Update your credit card information through the hosted credit card page you are directed to in the dunning emails from Chargify.  In this scenario, your credit card information will update right away.
2. Log into your Chargify account and update your credit card information through the card update page, “/account/payment_profile/edit”. If you do it this way, you will receive the dunning messages until the information is processed.  The changes should take effect within 12 hours or at midnight, when the information is processed; in which case you should no longer receive dunning emails.

There are a number of causes that can result in your customers’ credit card charges not being successful. Some of these causes start with your customer, with their bank, with your payment gateway/merchant account, or with your payment gateway settings in Chargify.

Here’s a brief summary of areas where a failure can occur:

Customer-Specific Problems

Not only could your customer’s credit card be expired or over its limit, but also your customer may have given the wrong billing address or zip code, or there may even be a fraud alert on their card for some reason.

Always try more than one credit card (like some of your own) so you can narrow down where the problem is really located.

Last week, we had some customers wondering if they could track billing data for multiple companies using Chargify.

Yes, you can.

Chargify was created by our team at Grasshopper Group because we needed a recurring billing system for our subscription-based businesses.  When developing Chargify we had our customers’ same challenge in mind, to make sure we could use it to track billing for all of the Grasshopper Group businesses.  That’s why, if you have more than one company, you can use Chargify to bill customers for all of them – and keep the accounting separate.

Chargify gives you two options - to build out the accounts separately as multiple sites or to build out the accounts as one site with multiple product families.

Every Monday, from this week on, we will be writing a post answering the top support questions from the previous week. Last week, we had a lot of questions come in from our customers wondering what happens when they hit their plan threshold.  This is a great question and we thought it would be beneficial to share this information with all of you. 

There is no need to ever worry about exceeding the allotted amount of customers on your plan; your customers will never be rejected.  Regardless of the plan you’re on, we make it easy for you to upgrade.  In fact, we will do it automatically and notify you beforehand. 

At Chargify, our goal is to help your business grow; we would never want to stop a signup!  That’s why we can assure you that the transition to the next level plan is seamless and that neither your account nor your customers will be affected!