Single invoicing or payment system.

cormie

Hi,
It's that time of year when a lot of my domains are due for renewal and although I know you can't control the way domains expire etc, I'd like to suggest an easier to manage billing and invoicing system. As it is, I'll have to deal with quite a lot of invoices for my vat return and it would be great if this could be reduced to one annual/quarterly/bi monthly etc advanced payment system.

As the domains have to be paid in advance, you could give customers the option to choose to pay for the domains as they expire or introduce a new option where you can pay so much in advance that you then have paid enough for all subscriptions that will be due before your next arranged payment.

So say for example you own:

hosting - 60eur - reg'd May 09
domain1.com - 5eur - reg'd May 09
domain2.ie - 20eur - reg'd Jul 09
domain3.com - 5eur - reg'd Jul 09
domain4.ie - 20eur - reg'd Sep 09
domain5.com - 5eur - reg'd Nov 09
domain6.eu - 5eur - reg'd Jan 10

The amount you pay in the space of 1 year is €120 inc VAT with the most expensive month being May.

Would it be possible to pay €120 in May 2010, which will cover your costs up until May 2011, but then instead of having to pay a big chunk like €120 again in May 2011, you can opt to pay €40 quarterly, so €40 again in August, November, February and May again. By the time May 2011 has come, you've already paid for up to May 2012, by the time May 2012 comes, you'll have paid for up to May 2013 and so on. This means that Blacknight will always have the money on account to pay for the domains automatically and that the customer only has to deal with 4 invoices for all services throughout the year and only ever has to worry about the €40 every 3 months (Unless they buy another .ie say and it goes to €45 every 3 months.

I haven't given this a lot of thought but just thought I'd throw it out there and see if it's possible at all? Perhaps with a more manageable first payment as that could be a problem for anyone who has a high yearly cost

flamegrill

Hi Cormie,

Unfortunately it's not possible to pay for domains like that. A domains life cycle is quite difficult to cater for registry wise let alone trying to split billing up in quarterly payments.

About the only thing that's flexible here is the hosting which you can potentially split up into monthly payments. I will on request consider a quarterly payment option which doesn't exist currently for no other reason than to avoid confusion if possible. i.e. monthly, annually, bi-annually and tri-annually seem to be enough to keep everyone happy. Let me know about this please.

Regarding the .ie's and .eu's those are not flexible at all and this is the registries fault.

.com/net/org/info/biz etc can be renewed when ever you wish throughout the year (obviously has to be done pre-expiration date) and this may also help you.

What do think of those options/thoughts?

Paul

cormie

Hi Paul,
Thanks for the reply I'm aware of the restrictions imposed that are out of your hands with the domain renewal, but my way was to incorporate just a different method where the cost of a domain renewal would basically be taken out of an account balance for that customer automatically without them knowing (needing to worry about and get loads of emails about that particular domain), and they are simply billed quarterly (or similar) for a set amount (based on %) of their total annual spend with blacknight. So what effectively is happening is that customers can choose to pay up front for domains that aren't due to expire for a good few months, so the money will be there when they ARE due for renewal. An automated system would then process the payment and take the funds from the account. The customer can check the activity at any stage but they aren't hassled by need to renew emails and loads of different invoices for each domain.

It would kind of work the same way the Toll Tag operators (well Easy Trip anyway) work. You Pay a forward payment to your account, then as you go through a toll, it's automatically deduced from your account. When your balance gets to a certain point, it's automatically topped up via direct debit to an amount that will cover your next few payments. As domain renewal is a lot more predictable than how many times you'll need to drive through a toll booth, the domain system could be done on a quarterly (etc) basis where you just pay an amount that covers what will be needed in ADVANCE.

So the customer is simply paying in advance, the money is there when the renewal date arrives on the system ready to pay the .com folk, the customer then gets a simple invoice once every 3 months or so detailing what the previous money was spent on and what is due to keep their advance payment in enough credit. If the customer decides not to renew, the quarterly amount is simply adjusted.