BigCommerce Customer Groups allow you to organize your customers, give them discounts, and restrict access to specific products or categories. When combined with PayWhirl, you can use this to offer Wholesale Member discounts, club pricing, and more!
In short, when a customer signs up for a Payment Plan with a BigCommerce customer Group assignment, that customer will automatically be placed in the group. Your customers can simply log in to their BigCommerce account to access the content/discounts based on their assigned BigCommerce Group.
Please Note: You may need to have an elevated level of BigCommerce to unlock the customer group feature.
The process to get this set-up in PayWhirl begins by setting up a Payment Plan to bill the customer for their membership. PayWhirl Payment Plans determine how much and how often to charge the customers.
PayWhirl Payment plan's with accounts connected to BigCommerce will automatically show a "BigCommerce Settings" section towards the bottom of all Payment Plans. Each plan can have its own BigCommerce settings. This way, you could have multiple membership tiers, each with unique benefits.
1) Go To Dashboard > Plans and Click "Create a Plan". Then fill out the plan details
2) Once you save the plan, you will see BigCommerce settings appear at the bottom of the plan settings page. This is how you assign customers to specific groups.
There are four main Big Commerce settings that you can adjust:
1) When should we (PayWhirl) place orders?
By default, it is set to "Place orders on all successful payments," but you can adjust this as needed. If you are not also selling a physical product as part of the membership, you may only need the order to get placed when the customer first signs up.
2) Default order status:
By default it is set to "Awaiting Fulfillment", but you can select from any of the BigCommerce order statuses.
3) What Customer Groups should we assign new subscribers to?
By default, customers are not set to a specific group. You will need to select the group you want to add them to.
4) Should we override the customer group if customers are already assigned to a group
By default, this is set to 'no,' but you may need to adjust this depending on how you want the groups to work. For members only/content gating setups, you may need to assign a customer to a specific group when they cancel their subscription. In that case, you would want this set to yes. This way, customers could sign back up and regain access to the content. Likewise, if you have different tiers of membership, you would need to override their current group when they switch plans.
Note: BigCommerce Customer Group Assignments are applied after the first-order processes. If you have a trial period or billing start date, that will delay the group from being applied in BigCommerce until after the order is processed. If you want the customer to get added to the group immediately after signup, select this box below the order settings:
3) The list of groups comes directly from your BigCommerce account. If you don't already have a group(s) created, go to "Customers" in your BigCommerce account and click on "Create a Customer Group."
When you create a group in BigCommerce, you can specify a discount amount for customers that are apart of the group. See this guide for more details on setting up groups in BigCommerce
4) Once you have finished setting up the plans, you can add them to a widget to display the plan options for the customers
5) Once you have your widget created, head back to BigCommerce and navigate to "Storefront" in the main menu, then click on "Web Pages" to create BigCommerce Page to embed your widget.
Once you have the page saved, you can direct customers to sign up for the membership by linking to that page. Customers who sign up through the PayWhirl widget will automatically be added to that group and enjoy the discount benefits you set up for the customer group in BigCommerce.
Note: When the customer cancels their subscription, the grouping in the customers accounts on BigCommerce removed automatically. This will prevent them from accessing the content until they subscribe again.
We also have dunning settings so you can control what happens if a customers payment fails. By default, BigCommerce Groups would remain active if a payment declines. However, you could adjust the payment decline rules to have it automatically cancel the customer's subscription on the first decline. Since their subscription was canceled they would automatically be removed from the group.
We also recommend adding the customer portal widget that can be embedded on your site. Usually, clients will embed this on a separate 'manage my membership" page on their BigCommerce stores. This way, customers can manage their membership or update payment information.
Related Articles:
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
The PayWhirl Team