A trial period, free period or free trial gives your (potential) customers the chance to get acquainted with your service or product.
A great opportunity for your customers to benefit from this and to help them make a purchase decision! 😄
With Plug&Pay you can set this up in two ways:
A trial period for authorisations
A trial period for iDEAL/Bancontact
Setting up a free trial period
When you offer memberships and subscriptions, you can offer your (potential) customers a free trial period. You set up a trial period based on the desired number of days. You can do this completely free of charge and it is an option that only applies to customers who pay for your services or products by means of an authorisation.
How do you set this up?
When you are on the dashboard of Plug&Pay, you can navigate to Products and create a new product (or select an existing product if you want to set it up for an existing product). Then go to the Prices tab.
When you then select the subscription option via 'Billing cycle', the 'discount' field appears. Here you can select 'trial period'. For the trial period you can set how long this period lasts and how much it costs! After this trial period, the regular subscription with the subscription costs the customer chooses starts.
In the above case, the first 14 days are free, then it becomes €50 per month.
On the checkout you will then see that your customers can only use this via an authorisation. That is because no mandate can be issued due to the free trial period. Your customer gives the authorisation by filling in their payment details themselves.
A trial period for iDEAL/Bancontact
For customers who pay their subscription with iDEAL or Bancontact, this works slightly differently. These customers then pay a symbolic amount of €0.02 for the subscription. This is because for iDEAL/Bancontact a transaction always has to take place in order to obtain the payment mandate from the customer.
In the example below, you offer the product with a trial period of two weeks. You charge an amount of €0.02 during the trial period. This is done so that a mandate can be created in the background for future subscriptions. After a period of two weeks, the subscription converts to an amount of €12 excluding VAT.
In the background this then looks like this: