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Working with a credit system

You can offer your clients the option to pay you with credits they received from you or that were bought in the webshop associated with your SuperSaaS account. Provided credits are shown as currency, clients can even use their credit in combination with online payment.

The credit system is an easy way to provide discounts and handle refunds. You can provide new customers with a starting credit, which is automatically applied to their first purchase(s). Similarly, you can give credit in, for example, dollars or euros to individual customers, which provides them with a discount towards their next purchase. This can also be useful to refund a booking, without money changing hands. You could even give clients unlimited credit if you have some other payment arrangement with them.

Another way to use the credit system is to allow your clients to buy credits from your webshop and use them to pay for services and/or resources provided by you. You can set an expiration date or have them be valid indefinitely. For example, a student might pay $200 for 10 lessons of $20 each, which he can then book at his own convenience and without having to pay for each individual lesson. You can choose whether credit is shown as currency or in credits. In the previous example, we could have sold 10 credits for $200 and each lesson would cost 1 credit. These credits function like a regular currency – you could price something at, say, 1.5 credits – but they can only be obtained upfront. If, instead, credit is denominated in your local currency, clients can partially pay with credit and pay the remainder via PayPal, for example.

Find instructions on how to set up and operate a credit system here:

Enabling the credit system

  1. On the Process tab, under Require payment or approval?, select Complete payment before continuing and click Save changes at the bottom of the screen. This will take you back to the Overview tab of the configuration screen.
  2. Select the Process tab again and click the Payment Setup link to the right of the Require payment or approval? section header.
Setting up the credit system

  1. Under “Credit System”, select either the second or third option. Depending on whether you want to use credits primarily to provide discounts and refunds to clients (option 2: Each client has a credit level; positive credit will be applied towards the next purchase) or have your clients use credits to pay for services and/or resources (option 3: All transactions are done with credit; the client needs to obtain credit before booking).

    If you would rather work with credits than with currency, select the radio button under option 3, that says: Same as previous, but amounts are shown as “credits” instead of the currency.

    When you enable the credit system, a credit field will be added to each of your clients’ profiles. If a client has credit, it will be applied to their next transaction. A non-zero credit is shown in the top-right corner of your client’s screen.

    If you would like to show a message at the top of your webshop page, you can edit and format it on this page as well.

  2. Click Save changes. This will take you back to your Dashboard.
If a client cancels a booking that was (partially) paid with credit the credit will be returned to him. Therefore, make sure that clients cannot cancel bookings that have already taken place. You can do so by going to the configuration screen, selecting the Process tab and making sure that the first option under the section “How long in advance can a client add or change his reservation?” is NOT set to zero, because ‘0’ means that clients can also change bookings in the past.

Configuring a starting credit

Configuring a starting credit
  1. On the right-hand side of your Dashboard, under the section “Users”, select the option Access Control
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the screen, where you’ll find the section Should new users receive a starting credit?
  3. Provide the credit level that new customers should start with. If you want to reset the credit level for existing clients to this level on the first day of every month, you can do so by checking the checkbox under this section
  4. Click Save changes. This will take you back to your Dashboard

Managing an individual client’s credit

Manipulating individual users’ credit
  1. On the right-hand side of your Dashboard, under the section “Users”, select the option User Management
  2. Find the customer whose credit you want to manage, either by scrolling through the list or using the search function, and click the Edit icon “edit” icon on the right of the client’s details
  3. Enter the value into the credit field. If you want to provide this client with unlimited credit, simply enter a minus sign (−) into the credit field
  4. Click Update User
Be careful when removing credits that were bought as part of a package of expiring credits in the webshop, as they can get removed a second time when the package expires. See the section “Adjusting expiring credits” below.

Setting up your webshop

In order to sell credit and/or products in your webshop, you need to have a payment provider. By default the system uses PayPal, see “Setting up PayPal” for details, or you can configure another payment provider.

  1. Assuming that you haven’t yet added any items to your webshop for any of your schedules, go to your Dashboard and select the option Payment Setup under the yellow section ‘Preferences’. This takes you to the Payment Setup screen
  2. Under the section “Credit System”, select the link sell credit. This takes you to the ‘Shop Management’ screen
Adding products, i.e. credits, to your webshop
  1. Click New product and fill out the fields as desired. Note that by offering more value in credit than is paid for in currency you can make it attractive for clients to pay with credits. If you intend to sell expiring credits, enter a time frame in the “Expiry time” field. The Supervise page on the Shop Management screen shows the history of credit purchases. The buyer can view their “Purchase history” on their “Your settings” page.
  2. Click Create Product
You can set the amount of credit associated with an item to unlimited by entering a dash (−) in the credit field. This can be useful for selling subscriptions through your shop.

Note that once you have added at least one item to your webshop, a Shop Management option is added to the Applications section of the menu on the right-hand side of your Dashboard as well as on various configuration screens.

Adjusting expiring credits

If you need to remove expiring credits that were bought in the shop, you would want to do so on the Supervise section of the Shop Management page. Although you can adjust an individual’s credit on the User Management page as described above, doing so with expiring credits could lead to a situation where the credits get deducted twice: Once due to the manual adjustment, and a second time when the purchase eventually expires. (Credits cannot go below zero, but they could inadvertently be removed from a subsequent purchase.)

On the “Supervise” page the history of still-valid credit purchases have an “Expire Now” icon next to them. If you click on this icon, the credits expire immediately and the remaining credit from that purchase is taken away from the user. The “Expire now” icon now turns into an “Undo” icon which allows you to revert the action. The Edit icon edit icon allows you to change the expiry date, by setting the expiry date to a dash (−) the credit will never expire.

Similarly, if you manually increase a user’s credits on the User Management screen they will not be part of any package, and will therefore never expire. If that’s not desired you can use the button Enter purchase manually. This allows you to enter a user name and an expiry date. You can enter a dash (−) for the credit level to give a user unlimited credit for a limited time.

Testing payment in the shop

You can test the payment process using our test payment button. It simulates the payment process without using a third party provider. It becomes available when you switch on the Test Mode. By using the test button you can easily experiment with buying things without having to go through the checkout process.

To activate the test button, go to the bottom of the Payment Setup page. Under Gateway Settings check the option Test mode. Switch to the PayPal sandbox gateway… A blue test button will now appear next to your products on the Shop page.

Directing clients to your webshop

How will your clients find your webshop? If a customer does not have any credit and you sell at least one item in your webshop that yields credit, the system will automatically show a “buy credit” link above the schedule. This link is created by using the magic word $auto in the standard text above the schedule. Hence, if you put your own text there, the link won’t be visible anymore, unless you reveal it again by adding $auto to your text. Alternatively, you could use the magic word $shop in the text above the schedule. This generates a link to the shop that is always visible, even if your customer has sufficient credit.

  1. On the Configuration screen of your schedule, select the Layout tab
  2. Scroll down to the section “Custom messages”

  3. Edit and format your message in the field labeled Message to show in the white space above the schedule.

    To automatically show a buy-credit-link if a client does not have any credit, include the magic word $auto in your message. This will reveal the text “Please buy credit before creating a new reservation”. You can edit your own reservations by clicking on them when the client does not have credit.

    If, instead, you would like to create a permanent link to your shop, then you should use the magic word $shop. For example, "Please buy credits in our $shop" will generate the message “Please buy credits in our shop”, where the word shop is a link to your webshop.

  4. Click Save changes
Webshop

An alternative way for your clients to get to your webshop is via the Buy credit link. This is located next to their credit level in the “Edit your information” screen, which is shown upon selecting Your Settings in the upper-right corner of the screen.

The message at the top of the shop page can be edited and formatted on the Payment Setup screen, under the section “Credit System”.

You could also sell physical goods through your webshop. In that case, you need to set the credit field to zero, while setting the ‘Inventory’ field to ensure you don’t end up overselling an item. If you want to allow your clients to buy multiple products at once, select the option Prompt user for quantity