Subscription Ordering Basics
The Subscription Orders tool in WebAlliance provides a website user the ability to establish an order that will automatically be placed at an interval of their choosing (once every two weeks for instance). Subscription Orders can be beneficial for a business in a number of ways such as improving cash flow, creating predictable growth, and also building customer loyalty.
Subscriptions
Think of a Subscription as a template for a group of orders to be scheduled in the future. The template tells the site what items are being ordered, who is ordering them, where it is shipping to, when the order should be created, how to ship them, and so on. Based on the schedule set for the Subscription, when the day comes for an order to be created, the site will analyze the Subscription data to see what order to create. The Subscription can be edited at any time and all future orders will follow the changes to the template.
Scheduled Orders
A Scheduled Order is an order that will happen in the future, based on the Subscription template. Typically, when a Subscription changes, all Scheduled Orders will change as well since when a Scheduled Order's date of creation arrives, it checks the template to see what order to create. A particular Scheduled Order can be modified to be different from the template. So for instance, if you want the third in a series of Scheduled Orders to be different than the template, you can do this. When doing that, an update to the Subscription will no longer change that particular Scheduled Order.
Past Scheduled Orders
A Past Scheduled Order is an order whose creation date arrived, and the order was created on the site. Note, that this is not an indication that an order has shipped. It only means that an order was created on the site. All other order behaviors will apply, such as the potential to abort on import, etc.
Primary User
A Subscription is a customer-based tool, though it has a Primary User. The Primary User represents the user for whom the Scheduled Orders will be placed for a particular Subscription. However, all users on a Customer Code will have access to their Customer Code's Subscriptions by default. You can turn off the ability for individual users to view or edit a subscription though if you want to limit access to only certain users on a Customer Code.
Permissions
To view Subscriptions, a user must have the "Allow Viewing of Subscription Orders" permission enabled on their User Detail. For a user to edit Subscriptions, they will also need the "Allow Editing of Subscription Orders" permission enabled.
Follow the steps below to adjust permissions on a User:
- Navigate to the User Detail you'd like to make permission changes to. You can utilize the User List tool to find a User by navigating to https://www.yourdomain.com/admin2/users/users while logged in as an admin.
- Select the "Miscellaneous" tab.
- Select "Subscription Orders" in the left navigation panel.
- Adjust the appropriate permissions.
- Be sure to click the "Save" button at the bottom right to save your changes.