Thank you for considering MINIBC as your subscription solution. Below we walk through the steps of purchase and post-purchase setup, validation and launching of the MINIBC Recurring Billing and Vaulting application.
Purchase Process:
- To move ahead with MINIBC, you’ll need to purchase our application using the owner account of your BigCommerce store. You’ll find our application in the Marketplace or via this link: https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/recurring-billing-vaulting-minibc/
- Once you’ve installed and paid for the MINIBC application, you will receive an email to book your initial training session. If you miss that email or would like to book that ahead of a planned purchase, you can do that here: https://calendly.com/bapodoug/minibc
- Before the training session you can speed things up just a little by adding – bcdev@beapartof.com – as an admin user to your store. This account will be used by the MINIBC support staff to validate your store and during training to walk through your products.
- During your training session we’ll walk through all of the admin level items that you need to pay attention to; product setup and answer any general questions you might have.
- If you have other data requirements, product or subscriber imports these will be discussed during this meeting and will be planned accordingly.
Post-Purchase to Validation:
Once you’ve completed your training session there’s a few things that you’ll want to make sure to complete to move on toe the validation step of the MINIBC process.
- To start, within the App Settings section you’ll want to complete the following:
- Under Payment Gateway, you’ll want to fill-in and complete your primary gateway setup.
- Under General Settings, you’ll need to fill in the Store Name and Email Address locations. The email address you enter is one customers will see and be able to reply to.
- Under Tax, if you’re going to be using Avalara to be calculating subscriber taxes you’ll want to complete this section as well. If you’re using the BigCommerce built-in tax system or another tax software integration this step can be skipped.
- Next, under Emails, you’ll want to complete your email setup to communicate with your subscribers. You’ll find our full list with general context here – https://en.minibc.com/minibc-emails/ – and you can also see our sample templates so you can get a jump on writing these out.
- Products are next, you’ll need to add at least one product to your MINIBC account so that the support team can validate your install.
- Once you’ve completed the above please reach out to via our support page – https://en.minibc.com/support-request/ – to inform us that you’ve completed the steps above and are ready to move forward with validation.
Validation to Launch:
After the support team receives your request, they’ll preform the script install and validate your store with a test order to make everything is working as expected. We’ll reach out once this process is completed and you’ll be ready to being taking subscriptions with MINIBC.
Other Notes & Processes:
The below items are notes and/or a reminder for new customers. These may or may not apply to you as a new merchant. Should you have any other questions of course please reach out to us.
Subscriber and Product Imports:
If you have subscriber or product imports that need to be completed by the MINIBC team, timeline for both tasks will be discussed during your training session. In general the following needs to be completed before we can preform these imports:
Product imports, all of your products within BigCommerce need to have their subscription frequency options assigned and setup. If you’ll be setting up more than about 15-20 products you’ll want to use our product import template. You can find that – here – once you’ve completed the sheet, please send it back to us for processing. A reminder that all of your BigCommerce products need to be setup/completed first, this is very important, the import process will be the last item we complete before final testing and launch.
Subscriber imports, your BigCommerce store has to have all of the subscribers accounts created, the import only creates the subscription in MINIBC, we then attach it to an account within BigCommerce so that when subscribers login then can view their subscriptions.
Braintree Gateway Notice:
Merchants signing up for MINIBC that already have an existing Braintree account, note that you may need to upgrade to a Braintree Direct account. This is a different account level than the one you likely signed up with initially via BigCommerce. This is a relatively new change to the Braintree product offering, but something to be aware of and also proactively look into changing before launching with us.
Payments Processing and Refunds:
Once MINIBC is installed and running on your store, credit card base orders will not be able to be refunded within the BigCommerce admin interface. Your refund process will to change slightly to process refunds within MINIBC application; under the Orders tab or within your gateway of choice. This is do to existing security and API restrictions within the existing BigCommerce framework that doesn’t allow MINIBC to push in all the data required for BigCommerce to process refunds itself. This will be covered in your training session(s) with your MINIBC representative, though we wanted to make sure you as the merchant were aware of this change in process ahead of validating and launching MINIBC as your recurring billing and vaulting solution.
