Unusual renewal of subscription products

Question

Marketing wants to sell a subscription product at a discounted price of 5 septims a year for 3 years, and then return it to its regular price of 10 septims after that.

In discussion the idea came up to:

• Generate 3 new products (SUB_Y1, SUB_Y2, and SUB_Y3 in addition to the existing SUB product)
• Set up the renewals notifications for the first 3 products to encourage users to renew
• Direct them only to the next product in the series
• Offer them the regular product after the first 3 cheap years

However, I know my marketing department; if I do this, they will want more, and by the end of the year I will have 25 different series, each of which having 2 to 5 steps in the process. My /admin/store/products/view will be a nightmare to behold.

Is there a cleaner way of handling this that will not use up much of the 25 minutes actual coding time I am alotted each week?

Answer 1

Ultimately I altered the custom module with a toggle to extend the "different price after first month" to 1,3,6, or 12 months, and attach that to the product. Given that the module was outdated custom variant of a Ubercart mod in the first place, there was nothing to contrib to. Solution worked very well though, if anyone bumps into it.

Answer 2

I've not used UC Recurring Payments and Subscriptions before properly, but if each payment is a fully fledged order then I imagine you could use Conditional Actions to look at the date compared to the initial purchase date and give a discount if that is within the three years. The coding effort is then just creating a new condition using hook_ca_condition() which is not hard, and then after that setting up the pricing rules in the CA interface.