Authorize.net - delayed payment and recurring

Question

I have a question regarding Authorize.net.

Heres the scenario:

User signs up and is charged $5 right away for a sample product (and credit card is registered into ARB recurring billing profile). Two weeks later they are subscribed to the monthly product subscription if they don't cancel, and are charged a 'membership' fee on their first monthly payment.

So payments:
First purchase: $5
First month: $20membership + $30/mth
Rest of the months: $30/mth

From my research it looks the first purchase and then setting up a monthly payment with recurring with a two week trial period will be easy.

However, how should I deal with the first month membership payment? It is a one off payment that needs to be delayed two weeks after the first payment. This system being built is very simplistic and am not using any database backend, so solutions must be able to be done at time of purchase, or through the authorize.net backend.

Answer 1

ARB offers trial periods which allows you to set a special price to be charged for a set time period before the regular subscription price kicks in. This will do exactly what you need. As for when the subscription starts, just set the start date to be two weeks from today's date.