Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 2) – Account Configuration

If you’ve ever accepted payments with PayPal you’ll know all the magic is in the settings/configuration. There are tons of configuration options that you can modify to make PayPal work just the way you like. The same holds true for Spreedly. The developers have paid attention to detail and provided us with the ability to tweak how the service interacts with your chosen payment gateway so you can get just the functionality you’re looking for. In the last post I gave you a brief introduction to Spreedly and walked you through creating your own free test account. Today we’re going to jump in head first and look at the account configuration options.

For those viewers following along at home, if you look at the configuration page, I’m going to cover each section in reverse order wrapping up with setting up your subscription plans.

Site Details

The site details section is where, you guess it, you enter the details of the site you are going to be integrating with Spreedly. The information requested on this form is pretty straight forward so I’m just going to touch on 2 parts.

URLs

About half way through the form they ask for 3 URLs:

1. Subscriber Changed Notification URL

   Since you are using a system that is external to your application to handle payment processing you will have to work out some way to sync the two so your sure people have only those accounts they have paid for. That’s where the subscribers changed notification URL comes into play. When subscriber data within Spreedly changes, the service will POST a comma separated value list of subscriber IDs to the address you specify here. It then becomes your responsibility to process those changes and sync them with your application.

2. Individual user URL on your site

   This is the address that users visit to view their specific information in your program. Spreedly uses this address to redirect users back to your program from their update screen.

3. Subscription selection URL on your site

   This is that place in your program where users can upgrade/downgrade their account. Again, Spreedly uses this address to redirect users back to your program from their system.

I will come back to these URLs later in the series so go ahead and leave them blank for now.

API Authentication Token

At the bottom of the site details form you will find your sites API Authentication Token. This is the token you will use when interacting with the Spreedly API. Be sure to handle with care and keep it a secret… you can always generate a new one if you need to. Make note of this because we will be using it in the posts to come.

Manage Site Users

One of the really nice things about Spreedly is that you can add as many users to your account as you wish without hitting any limits. So, if your organization has a 10 person support/accounting team (wishful thinking perhaps) you can add them all with their own access information from the Manage Site Users section.

Payment Gateway

The Payment Gateway section is where you will go when you’re ready to take your site out of testing and into production. You will have to upgrade your Spreedly account from a test site to a production site and either sign-up for the monthly pricing option or bite the bullet and get a Kickstart package. For the time being, the page just displays some example CC numbers you can use to generate different errors.

Subscription Plans

Now to the important stuff! The Subscription Plans section is where you setup your applications different subscription plans and pricing. By default, Spreedly has setup one example plan to give you an idea how things work. I will issue one word of caution here, you CANNOT delete subscription plans. I hope this is coming soon, because I have made a mess out of my other account, but for right now it can’t be done. Just keep this in mind as you enter your plans.

I want to draw your attention to 2 pieces on this form:

Feature Level

The feature level is the name with which you will refer to the subscription plan through the API. You want to keep this simple yet specific so you can easily match it up with a subscription type. I typically just repeat the plan name as one word lowercase just to keep it easy.

Plan Type

The type of plan is where you can specify if this is a regular subscription, gift subscription or free trial. This really gives you a lot of options when setting up your applications pricing structure. You can set the amount of time each plan is valid for before charging the user again (number of days or months). You can also specify if you want to require auto-recurring purchases (you only accept auto-recurring payments) or not. The sky’s the limit!

That’s it!

After you play around with your settings and subscription types a little bit you will have a configured Spreedly test account ready to accept subscribers. In the next post I’m going to take a break from the Spreedly specific stuff for a little while and talk about planning your sign-up/checkout process and determining how that’s going to work with your newly configured Spreedly account.

Related posts:

1. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 1) – Overview & Account Setup