Persistent Subscription Bug in FluentCart
It's great that "Subscription" feature is available for free in the core version. However, despite many recent updates, the FluentCart team has either failed to notice or been unable to resolve a persistent bug in the subsciption pricing plan. Or am I wrong!!?
Let me illustrate it in a simple manner. You have got a digital product priced at usd 30 set at a monthly subscription plan with a trial period of 7 days. Naturally, when there is trial period, the price would amount to 0.00 usd. So you can simply hit "place order" without the need to make any payment in the offline payment method. And now your digital product is added in your dashboard. In the customer profile frontend dashboard, you see "COMPLETED" purchase. But when you click on the "Subscription Plans" tab, you see the message "No SUBSCRIPTIONS yet. Once you subscribe to a plan, it will appear here."
To me, this seems to be very illogical from a programming perspective. You subscribe to the 7 day trial and you get access to the product. But then in the "Customer Profile", there isn't any "Subscription Plan" visible.
I sincerely urge the FluentCart team and Jewel to look into this issue and have it sorted out for the benefit of the FluentCart fraternity.
arjun arjun If you use a payment gateway and the total amount is zero because of the trial period, the subscription will still be created successfully. You’ll be able to see it in the Subscription Plans tab, and the status will appear as Trialing. Once the trial period ends, the next payment will be charged automatically based on the subscription settings.
In your case, since you are using the offline payment method, the subscription stays in Pending status. That’s why it does not appear in the Subscription Plans tab as an active subscription.
For testing subscription related features, use a payment gateway in sandbox/test mode instead of the offline payment method, as it will give you a better subscription flow experience.
Ariful Islam Thank you for the response, although the current post is not talking about "testing subscription related features". The current post is actually talking about purchasing subscription plans in a live, production site using the manual payment method like QR code transactions as practiced in many eCommerce sites.
In programming logic, when a subscription plan order is "marked as paid", it should not matter whether it is done manually or automatically through any payment gateway. If you have purchased the subscription plan manually, then obviously you will renew it manually or pay for the next installment manually. But it should not be shown as "inactive" or "pending" when the order is marked paid by whatever method. If something is "Paid", then it is "Paid". The method should not matter in deciding if it is paid or not, once it is truly paid.
I urge you to consider the best practices and the relevant logic in this context. Thank you.
Thank you for clarifying the use case. I understand your point: if a subscription order is marked as paid, the expected business logic is that the subscription should become active regardless of whether the payment was collected through a gateway or manually.
At the moment, FluentCart subscriptions are gateway-specific. Subscription lifecycle handling, such as activation, renewal, cancellation, and payment status updates, currently depends on supported payment gateway subscription events. Manual/offline subscription handling is not available yet.
That said, manual subscription support is already on our roadmap. The use case you described, supporting subscriptions for QR code/manual transactions for live production stores, will be available when the manual subscription feature is released.
Curious, would you use the same logic for a paid trial? Example: $1 to $5 trial for limited access to a product/membership then it will be $49 per month?