The Payment System has been modified and a Recurring Billing Cycle has been added

March 27, 2009
We'd like to let you know that our in-house built payment system has been updated to include a recurring annual billing cycle method.

This essential improvement will enable the payment cycle to be automated for reseller hosting stores that use our billing system. We hope you recognize the fact that this significant step is purely intended to assist you in providing a fully automated billing service to your clients, saving them time and effort when renewing the services they have purchased from you.

Here, we'll explain how the newly integrated recurring billing system works in detail to help you understand the process and share your feedback to us. Your important assistance will help us in smoothing out any possible problems.

We'll also follow the path of an incoming order into our system to put you in the picture. When a new PayPal payment is received through your store (whether for a hosting plan setup, domain registration/transfer, upgrade service, renew/change plan service, etc.), our system provides a unique recurring Profile ID to the order along with the standard Transaction ID for the current payment.

Unlike the Transaction ID, which refers to a one-time payment for the submitted order, the Profile ID identifies the ordered service as recurring billing and serves as a reference for service renewal. The Transaction ID and Profile ID are both included in the PayPal Transaction Notification email that your clients receive after a translation is completed. A Transaction ID may contain multiple Profile IDs depending on the amount of services ordered at the same time.

If a customer orders a hosting account with a domain name (not free), for example, he or she will receive a confirmation email including one Transaction ID and two distinct Profile IDs (one for the hosting plan and one for the domain name). If the hosting package includes a free domain name, however, the purchase confirmation email will only contain one Profile ID.

Our Sales Team will handle the payment in the regular manner once the incoming order has been verified with your customer. To put it another way, there will be no significant changes to the standard payment processing operation. The addition of a Profile ID to the usual PayPal Transaction Notification email where the Transaction ID is included will be the only new feature about the recurring annual billing cycle introduction.

If you give this Profile ID to your customers' transactions, they'll be able to be invoiced automatically for another year if they want to keep the recurring cycle going. Every newly purchased web hosting plan (including domain registration/transfer) and all subsequent related upgrades (such as domain registration/transfer and any other service upgrades) will have the new recurring annual billing cycle enabled by default.

We're currently working on a way for your clients to disable it from their Web Hosting Control Panels if they need to, and we expect it to be finished soon. Due to payment processor restrictions, services purchased for more than two years (for example, a two-year domain renewal service) are not granted recurring Profile IDs. Our system will try to bill your customer a week before the actual expiration of the service using the Profile ID provided on sign-up, and if successful, will issue a reminder.

In the event of a billing issue, your customer will receive an email asking them to review and update their PayPal account information. The new Recurring Contracts section in your Reseller Control Panel will also give you the option of tracking the Profile IDs allocated to each incoming payment as a reseller.