Set up payments

Billing in subscription commerce can involve many variables. Fortunately, the marketplace billing engine is very flexible and versatile, and can handle many different complex aspects of the process, such as:

• Purchase permissions and limits—Who is allowed to make purchases on the marketplace? Are there limits on the amount buyers can spend per month? Per year? Are products purchased by customers themselves, or by a Reseller or Sales Agent who is able to buy on their behalf?
• Billing cycle—How often is a customer charged for each product? What is the date on which customers are charged? Is it the same date for all customers and products, with partial charges for products that were bought between billing dates? Or does each purchase have its own billing cycle?
• Invoicing options—What information will appear on invoices? To whom will invoices be addressed? How will individual charges be represented on the invoice?
• Payment requirements—What gateway will you use to process payments? What forms of payment will it accept? When will customers' payment information be required, and who will supply it?

You can also set some default values that apply unless a more specific setting overrides them. For example, you can set a default grace period that applies when a payment is late, during which a product subscription is still valid.

❗ Important: Many crucial billing settings can only be changed with great difficulty once the marketplace has been launched for business, so it's important to get them right. It is strongly recommended that you work with billing representatives from your company's finance team to determine what your billing requirements are, so you can set them correctly on the marketplace before your marketplace launch.

Choosing a payment gateway

The AppDirect platform supports a number of payment gateways out of the box. If you have an account with one of these payment gateways, you can connect to it easily from within the marketplace. For more information, see Configure payment gateways.

You may also decide to select a new payment gateway if you don't already have one, or if your current gateway doesn't meet your needs (for example, if you want to support both credit card transactions and ACH bank transfers, but your current gateway does not handle ACH).

❗ Important: The payment gateway is one of those items that can only be changed with great difficulty once the marketplace has been launched for business! Be sure that you make the right choice: work with your finance team to be sure that the gateway you pick meets all your requirements.

Basic billing settings

📝 Note: If the AppDirect logo appears in the upper-left corner of the page, when Manage > Marketplace appears in this topic, click the grid icon > Switch to | Store, instead.

While there are many aspects of billing that you can set, some configuration tasks are either required or strongly recommended before you conduct commerce on your marketplace. These include:

• Configure payment gateways—Specify a supported payment gateway to use for processing payments.
• Configure purchase restrictions—Specify who can make purchases, and set company spending limits.
• Configure subscriptions—Set grace periods, and define basic subscription behavior.
• Configure payment requirements—Specify criteria for when buyers must enter their payment information.
• Configure contracts—Define whether and how subscription contracts can be modified after purchase.

The marketplace supports many other billing settings that let you specify how different aspects of billing are to be handled. Most of these items appear on the Billing page:

• Manage > Marketplace > Settings > BILLING SETTINGS**| Billing Functionality**

For a more details on billing options, see Billing section.