One-Time E-commerce Checkouts
Firmhouse supports full one-time checkouts via Firmhouse Checkout. This allows you as a merchant to offer a consistent and holistic experience to all your customers, whichever way you choose to sell.
This article explains how one-time checkouts work and what to expect.
Currently for Recurring Order Businesses Only
This feature is available for merchants using the "Smart Order-based" project type. Merchants with a rental, lease, or Product as a Service business model are not yet supported.
One-Time Purchase Carts vs Subscription Carts
Technically, Firmhouse already supports full one-time purchase carts. However, they currently show up as subscriptions in the Firmhouse portal, analytics, etc. without a way to distinguish full subscription or hybrid checkouts from only one-time product checkouts.
With the one-time purchase feature enabled, carts that consist of only "one time shipment" products will be treated as one-time purchases. When at least one of the items in a cart is set to have a recurring order schedule, the cart is treated as a subscription.
New "One-Time Purchase" Customer Status
Customers that check out a full one-time purchase cart get the new status One-time purchase. You can filter on this new status so that you can distinguish one-time purchases from regular subscriptions. Exports and API also reflect this new status as one_time_purchase or ONE_TIME_PURCHASE.
Upgrading from One-Time Purchases is Currently Not Possible
When someone places an order as a one-time purchase, they cannot upgrade their initial order to a subscription. It is also not possible to add any products to their order via the Self Service Center.
We are considering designing flows so that when a customer places a one-time purchase, it becomes easy to upgrade or upsell those customers to getting a subscription. At the moment this is not possible yet without the customer doing a fully new Checkout that includes any desired subscription products.
What Does It Look Like in the Self Service Center?
With the multi-accounts feature enabled in your Firmhouse project, combining subscriptions and one-time purchases looks as follows:
Distinguishing Between One-Time and Recurring Payment Methods
Currently, we show the same payment methods to customers checking out a full one-time cart and to those who are checking out subscription products. The effect is that payment methods that are only suitable for one-time purchase payments are still hidden from the payment step.
We are exploring ways to make this customizable so that you can offer more payment methods to customers checking out one-time purchases.
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