Part-Payments / Down-payments
Charging a percentage of the full rental fee up-front, and the remainder at a later date
Some rental operations have large lead times - in other words, the customer places their order for rental dates that might be 1, 2 or 12 months into the future.
For example, a wedding. Customers will often place their order for props and other items they'll be renting for the occasion, up to 12 months in advance.
The customer may not want to pay the full amount up front, and in fairness some rental businesses might not want to take the full amount up front either.
With Product Rentals Pro, it's easy to charge any amount now, and the remainder in the future, such as some date close to the delivery date/rental start date.
We can do this in partnership with Downpay - a 3rd party app which enables partial payments and later capture of the order balance.
Downpay offers special pricing for rental businesses and package discounts might be available for any new merchants subscribing to both Product Rentals Pro and Downpay for the first time. Just get in touch for details.
Setup Guide
For any examples below we'll use a merchant that rents luxury silk flower bouquets and arrangements for weddings. We want to charge 20% at time of order and the remainder at a later date.
Configuring your Products
In Shopify, you just configure your product using the full rental fee. This can be set to something different for each variant or each predefined rental duration you have set up. In short, there's no special configuration required here.
Applying a Selling Plan to the Product with Downpay
In Shopify, the settings that allow part of the rental fee to be charged now, and the remainder at a later date, are called a Selling Plan (sometimes called a Purchase Option).
This Selling Plan is created in Downpay, and Downpay will apply it to your product.
Step-By-Step Guide
Ensure you have Downpay installed, with Downpay Cart App Embed enabled within your theme. Then, go to the Downpay app home/dashboard screen from within the Shopify admin.
Complete the first fields. E.g. Purchase option name: All Silk Flowers Line item help text: 50% now, 50% at delivery
For the Product selection type, choose the rental Products (or Variants) that this selling plan/purchase option will apply to.
For the Deposit options, choose how much of the rental fee you want to charge now, and how much later. This can be done as a percentage or an exact amount. The amount entered will be the amount captured with the inital order. You can also choose to give customers the option to pay in full.
You can leave the other settings until Deferred payment due date. Here you can just enter "365" as the Number of days after checkout. This will give you a year to attempt charges for the remainder of the balance. If you need a longer time period than this, you'll need to use On a specific date and set it to a date far into the future.
Save the Purchase Option.
Now if you return to your Product in Shopify, and scroll down to Purchase options, you'll see what you just created in Downpay applied to the Product.
At Checkout, Shopify will put a number of new text blocks into the screen to inform the customer that they're agreeing to a deferred payment of some kind. Sometimes the wording of this is not ideal or potentially confusing for customers. These text blocks can't be removed, but the wording can be changed on all of them, by modifying your theme content. One example of a text block added in Checkout is below:
Usage Guide
Once orders have come in with the down-payment paid, Shopify will show an unpaid "Balance" on the order. As long as the order has come through with the Downpay purchase option applied, the order screen will show a button to Collect Payment. You can click this, then select the customer's original payment method, and a charge will be attempted for the balance of the order.
Please note: This only ATTEMPTS a charge on the payment method. It does not guarantee that it will be successful. The card may have been cancelled, it may have insufficient funds, or may be declined for various other reasons. If you want it to be certain, then look into Authorisation Charges (guide coming soon).
If the charge is unsuccessful, because the payment method is no longer valid or doesn't have sufficient funds, you can either re-try later, or you can collect payment from the customer another way. For example they could provide card details over the phone and you can key them in (use the Other credit card option from the button) or have them do a bank transfer, then select Mark as Paid.
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