How to Create Recurring Payments in OpenCart 3.0

Recurring Profiles in OpenCart allow you to create recurring payment options for your customers. These are subscriptions that charge customers over a specified period of time and with a specified sum.

If you are selling products with a subscription, this is an ideal way to break down the total price of the product into smaller costs, so they are more convenient for customers.

Let’s see how to setup the recurring profiles in your OpenCart shop.

We’ll be using a test installation of OpenCart 3.0.0.0.

Add a New Recurring Profile

Go to Catalog > Recurring Profiles and click on Add New.

This is where you configure the details about the new recurring payment profile. As you may notice, there are two main sections here - Recurring Profile and Trial Profile.

Start from the Name - this will be shown in the storefront where customers will have to choose their preferred recurring payment. For example - Daily - $1.

Price - configure the price of the recurring profile. In other words, how much your store will charge the customer. For example - $1.

Duration - specify the period of time during which the recurring payments will be performed. For example - 20 days.

For unlimited duration that the customer can cancel on their own, leave this at “0”.

Cycle - the cycle determines the frequency of the payments.

Frequency - this setting configures the frequency of the payments according to the cycle. For example, if the cycle is set to “1” and the frequency is set to Day, the customer will be charged once per day.

If you want to charge customers once every three weeks, set the Cycle to “3” and the Frequency to Week.

Status - enable or disable the recurring profile.

Trial Profile

You can add a trial period to a recurring profile. This can be a free trial or a discounted pre-payment program. These are the details you have to configure:

Trial Price - the price that customers will have to pay during the trial period.

Trial Duration - the duration of the trial during which the customer will be charged periodically.

Trial Frequency - the frequency of the billing that will occur over the specified period in “Trial Duration.”

Trial Status - enable or disable the trial profile.

Sort Order - the sort order number for the entire recurring profile (Recurring and Trial).

Recurring Profile List

We have created three recurring profiles that will now be assigned to a product so you can see how they work in the storefront and how customers will interact with them.

We have three options - Daily, Weekly and Monthly. Now, let’s assign them to a product and go to the storefront.

Assigning a Recurring Profile to a Product

To assign a recurring profile to a product, go to your Catalog > Products, select a product and go to the Recurring tab.

Hit the Add Recurring button and select the profile of your choice.

For our example, we have assigned all three recurring profiles.

Let’s go to the storefront and see how the recurring profiles look like when they are assigned to a product.

You will see a new section in the product page called Payment Profile. It’s a dropdown menu that lets customers choose the payment plan they prefer.

When the customer selects the payment profile and hits the Add to Cart button, the product will be added in their shopping cart.

With one difference.

They will see the payment profile they selected under the product name in the Cart View.

This confirms that the recurring profile works and that the customer will be subscribed to it when they finish their checkout.

Hold Up, We’re Not Done!

If you have configured your recurring profiles, but don’t have a payment method that supports them, your customers will not be able to use the subscription.

Simply because they will not be able to finish the checkout.

This will appear on Step 5: Payment Method of the checkout process if your payment methods are not configured properly:

So, you need to configure a payment method that customers can use for recurring payments.

From the built-in payment extensions, PayPal Express Checkout is the one that supports recurring payments.

Go to Extensions > Extensions > Payments and install PayPal Express Checkout.

When you configure and enable the payment method, customers will be able to checkout with their subscriptions so you can put the recurring profiles to use.

Other extensions that support recurring profiles in OpenCart can be downloaded from the marketplace. Popular examples are Square, Stripe and Braintree.

Conclusion

That’s about it for the recurring profiles in OpenCart. If you are offering a subscription-based service, a free trial for a product or anything that requires recurring payments, this is how you can do it in OpenCart. We hope this was helpful. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below!