Stax Bill provides a "Subscription Updater" feature which allows you to make changes to your existing subscriber base after making changes to your Catalog.
Note: If a subscription product has a price override, the price will stay overridden. This is for updating the underlying price of existing subscription products for subscriptions of a plan in the catalog. If the override is later removed, the underlying default price will return to the catalog amount.
You can modify plans to add products to existing customers to provide additional products upon request or if a plan has changed and you would like to add these changes to existing customers going forward.
See the following article for more information: Implementing Updates to Existing Subscriptions.
Monitoring Update Jobs on the Jobs Tab
The Jobs page will show you a list of all of the Update Jobs that have been submitted for this Plan.
Access a Plan's Jobs page by navigating to Catalog > Plans and clicking on Jobs under the respective plan.
Clicking Details will bring you to the Job Details screen.
You can investigate the results of a job with the Task Details list at the bottom of the screen. Use the filters to look for all failed updates, for example. For a failed transaction, you can hover above the Status to get a short explanation of why the update failed on that record.
Succeeded vs. Failed
The main reason why an update action will fail is that you have tried to add a product to a Customer or Subscription in a "non-active" state and also asked to generate charges. So, for example, if you add a product to a Cancelled Subscription, it cannot generate the charges associated with that addition, and therefore the update will fail. The product will not be added to that Subscription.
In general, if using the generate charges option will result in either a Subscription or a Customer being in an "invalid" state regarding invoicing, the update will fail.
You can see a list of which Subscriptions failed simply by returning to the Subscribers page and using Advanced Search for "Subscription Does Not Have Product"... choose the product that had the failures. You will see a list of those Subscriptions that were not updated (assuming the same set of filters used to generate the list in the first place).
Planning an Update
As mentioned above, the amount of time a Job can take to complete can be quite long, particularly if:
- The set of subscribers is very large (>1000)
- You are generating charges with each update
- Customers' billing settings are set to auto-post and auto-collect (the latter will require a round trip to the payment processor for each update, too)
For these reasons, use the Updater carefully and pay attention to the above factors when planning your Job. If you need a large update done by a certain date, make sure you start it in plenty of time to ensure all the updates are completed on time.
Tips for planning an update:
- Submit a small update job with the desired characteristics first. Include all the products you want to add, but only choose a few subscriptions to update (e.g. 10). Test and verify results.
- Next, you can try a slightly larger update set. An easy way not to duplicate work is to use the search filters to choose only those subscriptions which don't already contain one of the products you added in Step 1. Test and verify results.
- If 1 and 2 are successful, try your full update, though we recommend that you don't try to update more than ~1000 subscriptions in one Job. Use the filter options to repeatedly apply the update to new sets of subscriptions until all are complete.
Note: It is not harmful to try and add the same product into a subscription that already has it; it will simply be ignored, and you will see a message in your Job results to that effect.