Payment Driven Orders

What Is A Payment Driven Order?

The Payment Driven Orders feature, new in release 1.28 of SubscriptionBoss, integrates PayPal payments, orders and contacts into Infusionsoft for orders that were NOT originated via SubscriptionBoss. These will typically be:

• pre-existing PayPal subscriptions and recurring payment plans; or
• new subscriptions set up using PayPal Product or Subscription Buttons – set up under My Buttons on PayPal; or
• PayPal payments set up through other payment mechanisms such as Premise, WishlistMember, etc, where you need the PayPal payment to be integrated closely with the provision of the service.

Legacy Subscription Migration

Since SubscriptionBoss can be configured to set up contacts and orders automatically for existing subscriptions, then your Infusionsoft application will just ‘learn’ about existing customers as the regular payments come in. This is quite a cool and painless way to move existing PayPal customers on to a new Infusionsoft installation. The price point at which the a subscription order operates is just the payment amount in the IPN hence you only need to set up the subscription product once on Infusionsoft even if you have a whole bunch of customers who bought the same subscription at different price points at different points in the past.

PayPal Subscription Buttons

When you set up a subscription button on PayPal you can add an item_name and item_number to identify the product.

Set up the subscription on Infusionsoft with the default price point and a product name that is similar to if not an exact match to one on PayPal – you want the buyer to recognize that it is the same product they bought on PayPal. Also on Infusionsoft set up an Action Set that takes any steps required when a person orders that subscription. This could involves sending a welcome email, or a HTTP post to provision the service, chain to an existing action set, or simply set a tag that triggers an event in the Campaign Builder and hence adds the contact to the campaign and starts a campaign sequence. Note the number of the Action Set.

Back on SubscriptionBoss set up the subscription and complete the Recurring Charges section so it matches what it set up on Infusionsoft. In the Payment Driven Order Matching Rule add something like item_number=578484 where the iten number was the one you set up for the button on PayPal.
Also enter the number of the Action Set you want to trigger when the order is created.

Other PayPal Mechanisms

Essentially this is almost identical to the above in terms of the set-up on Infusionsoft and SubscriptionBoss. The only thing that is different is the Payment Driven Order Matching Rule

To determine a suitable rule, run a test and buy the product. Then inspect the IPN. You can do this in SubscriptionBoss | Notifications | View. Analyse the IPN and work out which field uniquely identifies the product/subscription. This will typically be one of item_number, item_name, custom, product_name, invoice, memo, etc. Then add the rule. For example, item_name=Platinum Club

How It Processes Each PayPal IPN For A Payment Driven Order

Using the Instant Payment Notification message Subscription Boss will:

• Try and match the payment to an existing order – if is succeeds that the payment is added; if not it continues
• Apply the matching rules to the IPN to see it matches the rules for any existing subscription; if it finds a match then it continues
• Create a contact in Infusionsoft if required using the PayPal email address, first name and last name
• Create a product or subscription order and an invoice and tag it with the PayPal Profile ID, and apply the payment to the invoice

Any subsequent payments for that subscription agreement get processed normally by being matched to the payment profile ID and applied to the correct invoice.

Payment Driven Order Limitations

The limitations are due to the information that is available within the IPN. These affect email addresses and payment plans.

PayPal Email Address

The PayPal IPN only contains the buyer’s PayPal email address. Therefore the contact will be registered in Infusionsoft with that email address. If you need a different contact email address then you will need to add it to the account manually or via an import and merge.

Multiple Stage Product Payment Plans

Payment Driven Orders will work fine for subscriptions, single product purchase and to a lesser extent with product plans.

With product plans, SB does not know whether the current payment is the first, interim or last one in the series as the PayPal IPN does not indicate this. All SubscriptionBoss can do is create the contact, the order, a default payment plan and apply the current payment as the first payment. If it is NOT the first payment then you will need to go in manually and add previous payments so the invoice reflects the current amount owed.

Payment Driven Order Future Plans

Right now the order matching rule is very basic. It could be made more sophisticated if there is a need to do so.

Please add suggestions in the SubscriptionBoss support forum as to how this feature can be improved.

For example, it is possible to read shipping address information from the IPN and use this to populate the shipping address in Infusionsoft.