Midterm change

Understand how a midterm change works.

A midterm change occurs when a customer requests a change to their subscription before their next renewal. A Call Center agent can use this opportunity to dissuade the customer from cancelling their subscription, encourage their customer to increase the quantity of their subscription, upgrade their subscription, purchase an add-on to their subscription, or sell another promotion.

The Call Center agent must identify the type of midterm change. The Call Center agent can offer a perpetual unit price or a one-time price override to persuade customers not to cancel their subscription. They can also offer to reduce the subscription quantity.

Perpetual unit price

Call Center agents can use the perpetual unit price (perpetualUnitPrice) attribute to assign a perpetual price to a subscription. A perpetual unit price remains the same each time the customer renews the monthly or annual subscription until they change their subscription by adding or subtracting quantity or add-ons. You essentially honor the deal until something changes. The customer can be an individual or business subscription entity.

For example, a Call Center agent creates a cart with a perpetual price. The catalog price for the subscription product is $20.00. When the agent sets the perpetual unit price to $15.00, the perpetual unit price does not change until the deal changes. When the deal changes, the price per unit can change (in this instance, it could change to $18.00).

Use the Perpetual Price and Cart resources to assign the perpetual price.

Prorated subscription price

Call Center agents can use the prorated unit price (proratedUnitPrice) to apply a midterm change with a price override to the unit price listed in the product catalog during a midterm subscription change request based on a customer's request. The customer may request an increase in the product quantity, a product upgrade, or a product add-on.

Use the Preview and Preview-cart resources to override a unit price, increase the base product quantity, upgrade the base product, increase the add-on product quantity, or add a new add-on via a midterm change. The Preview-cart resource creates a cart behind the scenes showing the customer how much the cost will change. The preview cart includes the credit, subtotal, total tax, and the total amount due to be paid if the preview changes result in an amount due. It also has a link to the cart with the rest of the payload. The Preview resource does not return the cart details if created in the response. Use the Preview resource to create a cart by subsequently calling another resource. The Preview and Preview-cart resources allow you to choose when and how to initiate a cart.

Once the shopper submits or confirms the immediate midterm change, any subsequent lifecycle operation (auto or manual renewal, product or quantity change, cancel, and so on) on the subscription will consider the changed configuration of the subscription and add-ons.‌

For example, a customer currently has a subscription of four and wants to increase the quantity to 10. They initially agreed to a unit price of $20.00 for $80.00. The Call Center agent offers a prorated unit price of $15.00 for an additional six subscriptions for $90.00 as an incentive for the subscription duration. The next time the customer renews their subscription, the unit price will be $20 for $200.00.

Reduced subscription quantity

You can also use the Reduce resource to decrease the base product quantity, decrease the product add-on quantity (quantity), or remove a product add-on from a subscription. Use the Reduce resource if a Preview resource call does not create a cart that decreases a product quantity or removes a product add-on. Invoking the Reduce resource will update the customer's configuration in the database tables.‌

For example, an agent can reduce a quantity of 10 subscriptions to 6 subscriptions at the customer's request.