Payment Plans Setup Instructions

Information on viewing and modifying payment plans.

How to view your currently offered payment plans:

Go to your Membership Management Administration Area. This is located at ‘https://paywithcardx.com/payment/recurring/MERCHANT/admin’.

*Please Note
For the link to be correct; replace the word “MERCHANT” in the above URL with your username.
Login, if you are prompted to do so
Locate the ‘Payment Plans’ section on the web page.
Click the ‘View Current Payment Plans’ button
the resulting web page is a listing of the payment plans your company is able to offer the public. If the resulting web page’s table is not viewable, then your company will be required to upload your ‘paymentplans.txt’ file again.

How to comprehend the data of your currently offered payment plans:

When viewing your currently offered payment plans, each column represents the following:


Field	Explanation
plan	is a indicator to our software stating the row represents a membership plan (This must be written as “PLAN” [not “plan”] for the plan to be considered valid. Additionally the “PLAN” field this needs to be the 1st column within your header line, preceded with a “!” [exclamation point] character.)
planid	is an identifier of the plan. This value must be unique and should be in number form. (Letters are allowed, but are not recommended) The plan number that is used in the join page “plan” field to represent which type of payment structure to use.
card-amount	is the dollar amount the customer will be charged when the customer signs up for the plan. The value is written with a whole dollar amount without a “$” or any “,” [commas]. [For example: $25.00 would be written as 25.00]
billingcycle	is the number of months between recur billing cycles. So if the plan were to be recur billed every 1 year, the value in this field would be 12. (Setting the “billingcycle” to “0” will result in the plan not being recur billed.)
months	is the number of months the customer receives for their first billing cycle. So if the plan is to allow the customer to have 1 year service before they are recur billed for the 1st time, the value in this field would be 12. This can be used in conjunction with the “days” field.
days	is the number for days the customer receives for their first billing cycle. So if the plan is to allow the customer to have 2 weeks service before they are recur billed for the 1st time, the value in this field would be 14. This can be used in conjunction with the “months” field. (If the plan is expect to be recur billed, add an additional 3 days to this value. This insures that 3 days before the customer’s end date, they will be recur billed. These results in the customer being recur billed exactly on their anniversary date.)
minutes	is the number of minutes the customer would be allowed to have access to in the merchant’s membership area. This field is only used for accounts, which have been specially modified to use this field. If you are using a standard setup or if your account has not been setup for this special feature either place in a value of “0” or leave the field blank.
success-link	is the URL of the database interface program on your web site. Do not change this value unless specifically notified by us to do so.
recurringfee	is the dollar amount the customer will be charged when they are recur billed. The value is written with the whole dollar amount without a “$” or any “,” [commas]. [For example: $25.00 would be written as 25.00]
purchaseid	is a field which is used to help represent what type of plan the customer signed up for. (This is optional) This value can be any combination of letters &/or numbers, but should be kept under 12 characters long. This field’s value should not contain spaces or special characters. In some modified membership management accounts, this field is used to represent which group a customer would belong to.
renewal	is a field which either allows or disallows a customer to renew (reactivate) their old account after they have resigned, expired or canceled from your membership services. The values for this field are either “yes” or “no”.
balance	is the total dollar amount the customer has left to be recur billed before we stop recur billing their account. The value is written with the whole dollar amount without a ‘$’ or any ‘,’ [commas]. Applicable for when doing Installment Billing only. [For example: $125.00 would be written as 125.00]
pwencrypt	options are none, crypt and md5. ’none’ is clear text password (no encryption), ‘crypt’ is standard .htpassword encryption, and ‘md5’ is normal md5 password encryption. ‘crypt’ is the default for Linux/Unix servers, and ’none’ is the default for Windows servers. Do not change the default unless advised to by technical support staff.

As an example of the above information, please see the below table & explanation.


plan	planid	card-amount	billcycle	months	days	success-link	recurringfee	purchaseid	renewal	balance
PLAN	1	24.99	1	1	3	http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/passwrdremote.cgi	10.99	basicplan	yes
PLAN	2	24.99	1	1	3	http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/passwrdremote.cgi	10.99	installmentplan	no	159.99

Notes:

Plan 1 in the table above, represents the following:

When the customer signs up for this plan, they will be charged $24.99 for 1-month initial service to the site. When that initial billing cycle has completed, the customer will be recur billed $10.99 for their next month’s service. This will continue until either the customer’s credit card fails the rebilling process or they have canceled their account.

The plan also states the customer is ordering a basic membership plan, which can be renewed (reactivated) if they should cancel the service.

Plan 2 in the table above, represents the following:

When the customer signs up for this plan, they will be charged $24.99 for 1-month initial service to the site. When that initial billing cycle has completed, the customer will be recur billed $10.99 for their next month’s service. As each recurring payment is successful, that amount is deducted from the balance. This will continue until either the customer’s credit card fails the rebilling process, they have canceled their account, or their balance reaches $0.00. Also should the last recurring payment be less then the normal recurring fee amount, we will charge the customer the lower remaining balance for their last payment.

The plan also states the customer is ordering a installment membership plan, which cannot be renewed (reactivated) if they should cancel the service.

Payment Plans Upload File Format:

To create a file that contains all of your offered payment plans, which can be uploaded into your Recurring Administration area, follow these guidelines.

Create a “TAB” delimited file containing the payment plan structures. The format of the file needs to be as follows:

The first line of the file is the header line. It tells our system what field’s data is contained within each column. The fields contained within your header will vary based on payment plan’s structure & various other settings necessary for proper usage (see field list above, for possible column names).

Header Line Example:

!PLAN [tab] planid [tab] card-amount [tab] billcycle [tab] months [tab] days [tab] success-link [tab] recurringfee [tab] purchaseid [tab] renewal [tab] balance

Note: [TAB] signifies the location of a TAB character, NOT the actual letters “T”, “A”, “B”. The first character in the line MUST be a “!” (exclamation mark), followed by the word “PLAN”. There should also not be any spaces before or after the [TAB] character within your completed file.

Every line there after will contain a payment plan’s payment structure & related /settings. One plan is to be entered per line. It should look something like this:

Plan Line Example:

PLAN [tab] 2 [tab] 24.99 [tab] 1 [tab] 1 [tab] 3 [tab] http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/passwrdremote.cgi [tab] 10.99 [tab] installmentplan [tab] no [tab] 159.99

The first field will always need to be the characters “PLAN”. The order of the other fields will depend on the order the field names appear in the first row.

NOTE: The example lines may be word-wrapped for display purposes and should not be so in your payment plans file. Each separate plan needs to be represented on its own single line.

The easiest way to create this type of file is to first create a spreadsheet with this information and then save the spreadsheet as a “TAB” delimited text file.

If you wanted to create our example plans as a payment plans file, it should look like this:

!PLAN [tab] planid [tab] card-amount [tab] billcycle [tab] months [tab] days [tab] success-link [tab] recurringfee [tab] purchaseid [tab] renewal [tab] balance
PLAN [tab] 1 [tab] 24.99 [tab] 1 [tab] 1 [tab] 3 [tab] http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/passwrdremote.cgi [tab] 10.99 [tab] basicplan [tab] yes [tab]
PLAN [tab] 2 [tab] 24.99 [tab] 1 [tab] 1 [tab] 3 [tab] http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/passwrdremote.cgi [tab] 10.99 [tab] installmentplan [tab] no [tab] 159.99

How to modify your payment plans:

Open your ‘paymentplans.txt’ file into a spreadsheet program, such as is Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3.
(If your spreadsheet software asks you what type of file this is, specify it is a tab-delimited file format.)
Add or remove plans using the above fields to specify a new plan, modify an existing plan, or remove an existing plan.
Save the file in a tab-delimited file format & name the file ‘paymentplans.txt’
Go to your Membership Management Administration Area. This is located at ‘https://pay1.plugnpay.com/payment/recurring/MERCHANT/admin’.

* Please Note: For the link to be correct; replace the word “MERCHANT” in the above URL with your username.
Login, if you are prompted to do so
Locate the ‘Payment Plans’ section on the web page.
Next to ‘File:’ you will see a text box & a browse button.
Either type in the path to the updated ‘paymentplans.txt’ file stored on your hard drive or use the browse button the use the operating system’s file browsing feature to select the file.
Click the ‘Upload Payment Plans’ button.
The resulting web page will show the pans that were just uploaded to your server. (If you do not see the plans you specified, verify your are uploading the correct file & then try to upload the file again. If the problem persists please use the helpdesk to submit a message to your support staff.)
Click the ‘Return To Main Page’ to close the new window and return back to your membership management admin area.
If everything went well, you successfully completed making modifications to your payment plans. The last steps are simply to reflect the new membership plans in your join web page on your web site.