You can create membership packages where your members can pay by installments. The benefits of this a huge, it opens up membership to those who may not be able to pay the full amount, increasing your membership number and making tennis more accessible. A Win Win. We have an article here: The Benefits Of Collecting Online Payments - Our Top 10!
This article sets out how to create the installment packages and also some FAQS:
- Are there additional fees or costs if we offer installments?
- How do I cancel a membership subscription?
- How does a member cancel a subscription?
- What happens when a payment fails due to insufficient funds or the card is blocked?
We also have this article to share with your members: How do I Purchase a Membership Package with Installments
You can select that the member has the option to Pay in Full and By Monthly installments or Only by Installments.
If you choose the Fixed Date and both options it will look like this:
Or if you choose continuous monthly installments only:
For further instruction on Creating A Membership Package see this article.
Fixed Date Packages and Monthly installments
If you select this option, you will enter the Membership Start Date and End date and Grace period. Select the payment option credit card.
You then enter the Monthly cost for new members and the monthly cost for renewals. These can be the same or different. If you have different costs, the cost for new members will be shown on the public page and the renewal cost will be presented to the member in their profile.
Note: Please be aware there is an additional cost from Stripe for the subscription payments - this is in addition to the normal transaction fees. It is 0.5% of the entire cost and is collected at payout. So you may want to increase the installment costs to cover this?
The number of monthly payments - can be from 2 - 12. If you chose 2 - the total cost would be split in two payments and be taken on the 1st and 2nd month. If you choose 10, but the length of the membership is 12 months, it would be taken over the first 10 months.
This is how this package would show publicly.
See The Installment payment date options:
Date of Purchase and Monthly Installments - set to continuous.
If you have this option, you will only get the option to select Credit Card. Check the Credit card box to enable the Allow payment in installments box to open.
You have to click the credit card box as there is no offline options here, then enable allow payments in installments.
The Installment payment date options:
This means this will work out when the payment is made. I.e. Today is the 4th January - if you choose the below this is date the 1st payment and continuous payments will be collected.
Unless you select - Enable pro-rata cost on the first payment :Pro-rata payments are available on continuous subscriptions only. If enabled we’ll take a pro-rata payment as soon as possible and then schedule the recurring payments from the next available payment date. So in the above example, if you selected 1st Month- and enabled prorata - it would take payment today (4th January for 27 days of January) and then again 1st February for the full amount.
Payment Reminders
Finally, decide if you would like to send payment reminders to your members. If they haven't paid yet we'll automatically send a reminder email to membership primary contacts 7, 14 and 21 days after a payment request was first sent to them. You can enable or disable these emails here.
Once you are happy with all the details of the membership package, click the 'Save package' button at the bottom of the page.
FAQs
Are there additional fees or costs if we offer installments?
Yes, for the subscription packages Stripe charges an additional 0.5% for subscription payments, this is collected at the point of payout, rather than within the fee. It is something you should take into account when setting the transaction fees.
How do I cancel a membership subscription?
Cancelling a membership subscription
A subscription for a continuous monthly membership or a membership being paid for via instalments can be cancelled from the allocation page by selecting Cancel within the Costs section.
Selecting cancel will open the Cancel subscription modal. To cancel the subscription, you will need to select the I confirm I want to cancel this subscription checkbox followed by the Confirm button.
Once the cancellation is confirmed, the main contact of the allocation will be sent an email confirming the cancellation and the subscription will be marked as cancelled on the allocation page.
How does a member cancel a subscription?
A member can cancel a subscription 2 ways - 1) via their bank and canceling a standing order or 2) via requesting the club admin to do it as listed above.
In both scenarios, the person will receive an email and the club admins who receive membership notifications informing them it is canceled. If they cancel via the bank, depending on the banks relationship with Stripe it may or may not update in ClubSpark.
What happens when a payment fails due to insufficient funds or the card is blocked?
If the monthly subscription fails, then the status will update in ClubSpark. An email will be sent to the member informing them it failed with a link to update the payment method.
The club administrators with membership notifications enabled will also receive an email. The club admins can click the retry button if needed. Stripe will also attempt a retry 3 times. If that fails, the club admin will also receive another email that they are unable to complete payment.
If they update their payment method, and a successful payment is made, this will update in the system.
An example of the email the member receives: Subject line: Membership Failed Payment
This is an example email sent to the administrators:
If this fails, you can also send a payment update link to the member, but this is from the dashboard. This is useful if a member wishes to change their bank account linked, or they are aware the card will fail due to fraud or lost card.
Steps to resolve this. : Log in the stripe dashboard: https://dashboard.stripe.com/ and on your page, click Subscriptions.
Select the persons subscription and open by clicking on their name.
Here you will see their details. Click on Action and Share payment update link.
A pop up will appear and you can either email this to the person, or copy the link and share with them. Note, there is an expiration date on the link. So if they report that it is not working, you can delete the previous links and send again.