We’ve heard you loud and clear! While we still love our Magic Link, we understand it’s not always the most convenient way to access the Self Service Center.
That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce an exciting update for merchants using Shopify: your customers can now seamlessly log into the Firmhouse SSC using their Shopify credentials. Enjoy a smoother, more integrated user experience with this streamlined login process!
Exciting news! You can now set a minimum order amount for your store, ensuring that orders below the required threshold are not accepted. It's a great way to manage your business needs and achieve your profitability goals!
Please note: This functionality is only available for Smart Order-based projects.
Let your customers add and remove products in their subscription directly from the Self Service Center. You can activate or disable this feature from the Portal.
When enabled, your customers can easily add products to their subscription or swap out current ones to try new flavors or explore more of your catalog. It's a fun way to discover new favorites!
Please note: This functionality is only available for Smart Order-based projects.
Read more about this functionality
We're working on further improvements to the product addition process. Stay tuned for updates!
You can now quickly and easily delete a customer’s personal data directly from the Portal, giving you more control over your customer information.
This new feature simplifies data management, allowing you to handle everything securely and confidently on your own, without needing to reach out to our support team.
We're excited to introduce a new feature that streamlines how you manage payments made outside the Firmhouse platform. Now, you can quickly mark invoices as paid directly from the Portal, making it easier and quicker to update your records. Simply use the new sub-menu item in the invoice overview on the subscriptions detail page to mark the invoice as paid.
Our API now allows upgrading your customers to a pre-paid plan. This currently works on Plan-based projects and we’re going to release this functionality for Recurring Order business models soon.
For instance: A customer currently pays €25 per month on their current plan. With the new flow, you can offer that customer a reduced price or €20 per month if they pay for 6 months up-front.
Customers don’t have to cancel their subscription and go through a new shortened payment flow to upgrade their current subscription to the new prepaid plan.
Billing cycles and orders will still be generated on the monthly cadence as they were, but no invoice or charge is required during the pre-paid period.
Read the details on how the new plan upgrades flow works
Check our developer guide for implementing a plan upgrade flow
We’ve added a new email notification which gets sent when products are added, removed, or updated in a customer’s subscription. Head over to email configuration page to configure this email.
The email is sent sent when making modifications via the createOrderedProduct, updateOrderedProduct, destroyOrderedProduct, enqueueOrderedProduct or dequeueOrderedProduct.
We batch all changes made via the API and wait 10 minutes before sending out the email. Otherwise, your customer would immediately receive an email for every update made.
You can now set a BCC email address for a Service Channel. With the BCC address the Service Channel is included in every email that goes out to the customers assigned to that Service Channel.
Including your Service Channels in all transactional customer-facing communication is a great way to involve your distributor, retail store, and other partners in every step of the customer journey.
⚠️ Make sure that you make your customers aware of including Service Channels in their communication. And that your privacy policy reflects this.
We’ve added and updated a few mutations in our GraphQL API. You can now create Service Channels with the createServiceChannel mutation and update the Service Channel for a Subscription via updateSubscription and updateAddressDetails.
Learn more about using Service Channels for selling through distributors and partners
Over the coming weeks, we’re gradually rolling out updates to the out-of-self service features that our platform offers.
First up is a gradual visual update of our out-of-the-box hosted Self Service Center, we’re calling SSC 1.5. The 1.5 visual refresh features a more modern interface, easier access to typical functionality, and a personalized touch.
We’re introducing a new sleek blue default color scheme that lays the groundwork for future customization options, allowing you to soon personalize the SSC with your own brand colors.
We taking care to strike a balance to what we update and how any custom CSS you may have applied is affected. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to do a sanity check on what you may need to update.
What’s New?
1. Modern Interface: Enjoy a fresh, engaging look with standardized card layouts for a consistent feel across all devices.
2. Blue Theme: Our new color scheme sets the stage for future customization options that can incorporate your brand’s look&feel.
3. Improved Copy: We’ve improved our copy for clarity and added personal touches.
What’s Next?
Customization Features: In our upcoming updates, you’ll be able customize the look and feel of your Self Service Center with your own brand colors and style, without having to maintain custom CSS and other scripts.
Dashboard Enhancements: We’re working on making the dashboard more intuitive to use. Clearly presenting the contents of a subscription and the next order pricing breakdown including shipping costs and discounts.
More self service features: Search & browse and add multiple products at the same time, add repeated one-time products to an order, trigger ad-hoc features.
Going beyond the hosted SSC: We’re working on several nifty self serve features that will blend with your regular e-commerce pages. Providing even more options to purchase and subscribe to your products, without having to leave a page.
Read more about the SSC 1.5 update and how it’s being rolled out
We now synchronize shipping costs from Shopify just in time before generating and charging for each order. This makes sure that every order generated will have the most up-to-date shipping costs as configured in your Shopify store.
On top of that we now also continuously sync shipping costs from Shopify when any changes are made to a subscription’s products. This way you and your customer always have access to the most correct shipping rate that will be charged on their next order.
Our integration with Klaviyo was upgraded to the most recent API version. This was needed because the old public API of Klaviyo will become unsupported as per June 30th, 2024.
With our upgrade it means that all Firmhouse merchants that use the Klaviyo integration can rest assured that everything will keep running as before.
We now have improved email validation on Checkout and API. The improved validation should prevent people from not getting emails after they signed up.
In addition: if you’re using Shopify, the validation improvements should also prevent that orders fail to generate because of Shopify’s stricter email validation.
We now add the discount code that was used at checkout to the eCommerce dataLayer. This allows you to track in Google Analytics and other analytics tools how individual or campaign discount codes are performing. The coupon key is now added to the ecommerce key in the dataLayer that is rendered on the order thank you page.
We’re introducing a big thing: Returns. With our new returns feature we introduce the concept of return orders. Return orders are created automatically when you or your customer initiate full cancellations or returns for individual products.
Upon completing a return order, the products in the return will automatically be removed from active billing. Or, if the return order consisted of only the remainder of the products, a subscription is automatically cancelled.
Return orders in Firmhouse work out-of-the box and provide you all the basic functionality to handle returns for your business. But if you’d like to hook up your existing return solution you can use our new webhooks events and our API to do so.
Your customers can now pick which products in their subscription they want to cancel and return. And they can keep being subscribed the remaining ones on the same subscription. Previously cancelling a subscription meant that the whole subscription was cancelled. But no more!
This opens up the opportunity to introduce swapping logic, by cancelling one product, and then adding another one. Or to cancel and return short-term rentals but keep renting long-term products. All from one subscription.
Read more about cancelling subscriptions and partial cancellations
Is your customer already stocked up on your products? Are they going on a vacation? Prevent waste and reduce churn.
We’ve made it possible for your customer to pause (and resume) their subscription via their Self Service Center. This feature is available for smart order-based projects and it can be enabled via the Self Service Center settings in the portal.
Learn more about how pausing and resuming subscriptions works
While we now offer the possibility to self-service the pausing and resuming of subscriptions, we've also made it possible for all of our stores to do this directly from the Portal.
Learn more about how pausing and resuming subscriptions works
Selling products to multiple countries and currencies? You can now define multiple international prices per product. And you only have to use one single Firmhouse environment.
When creating or editing products, you can now add a price for each country that you’ve enabled in your project.
A selection of smaller updates and improvements we'd like to make sure you know about, these include:
Automatic rate limits for the Shopify API
Counter caches for subscriptions
Table-views get a bit more love
More portal/API control over the next billing date
Quickly get to know when a subscription started.
Improved API Response for CreateAsset mutation
An update to the Outstanding Invoices Report
Fixed Upcoming Order Notice bug
We’ve added Veriff as an integration for providing identity document verification when signing up to your products. This way you can let your customers verify their identity before activating their subscription and before sending out your (high value) products.
At the time of writing, Veriff supports fully automatic AI-powered as well as human-assisted services for various types of identity documents (eg: passport, driver’s license, identification cards). They also offer additional KYC checks such as PEP and sanctions screening.
Your customers will be able to use their desktop/laptop and mobile phone to easily take a picture of their identity document to submit them for verification after checking out your subscription.
In Firmhouse, the Veriff app ties into our already supported identity verification and acceptance check flows. After signing up for Veriff, you can add the appropriate API connection credentials to your Firmhouse project and add an acceptance check for the Checkout.
Read about Veriff’s Document & Identity Verification services
Learn how to set up Veriff in Firmhouse
Learn more about adding acceptance checks for when customers sign up
You can now create, update, assign and un assign assets via the Firmhouse API. This allows you to create your own dashboards or integrate your own storefront or ERP systems with the assets you have on Firmhouse.
How merchants are using these new APIs:
Reserve a specific asset on or right after Checkout automatically based on a trigger from a webhook.
Set a custom field with a purchase price on an Asset based on its refurbished quality so you can sell an asset for its unique discounted price.
From a custom inventory reservation system update an Asset’s status, condition, and next available date.
Integrate your warehouse system to automatically unassign an asset as active from a Subscription when it’s been returned in healthy condition to your stock.
Head over to our new Developer Docs to view these new and updated GraphQL mutation calls:
assignAsset
unassignAsset
createAsset
updateAsset
Sometimes you store important information in an Extra Field that you want to push to other systems or that has a specific meaning in a 3rd party integration.
To make external systems aware of the purpose of a value stored in an extra field, we’ve added an extra attribute called Purpose. With the Purpose of an Extra Field you can let external integrations know how they should use the value in the field.
For now, the Purpose field is only vailable when you have the Intrum integration enabled. This way you can push an imported phone number to Intrum case files.
We have launched a new version of our developer website at developer.firmhouse.com. In terms of functionality, the new website features an updated navigation hierarchy and better search. In addition we’ve created a place for publishing tutorial-style guides.
Customers can now save their payment method for future use when paying for an invoice manually via invoice payment links.
With the new checkbox shown on every invoice payment link your customers can choose if they want to use the new payment method for future payments or not.
We’re gradually rolling out support for one time checkouts via Firmhouse Checkout. We invite all our merchants who are interested to get in touch and join our private beta.
Adding one time checkouts allows Firmhouse to support more traditional e-commerce in combination with all the new and innovative models we support such as subscriptions, rental, and try & buy. Adding support for one time checkouts is a key point for making sure you as merchant can offer a consistent and holistic experience to all your customers. Whichever way you choose to sell.
With one time checkouts enabled:
Checkouts with only “one off” products in the cart will be marked as “one time purchase” instead of being a. Full subscription carts or hybrid cards will still be treated as subscriptions.
Analytics and insights will ignore one time purchases from subscription metrics, making it easier to distinguish between your one time revenue and your recurring revenue.
The Self Service Center will be updated to make a clearer distinction between one time orders and subscriptions.
When creating an API access token, you can now set it up to expire within a number of chosen days. Our API will throw an error message on an expired token.
Expiring API tokens allow you to enforce key rotation policies. Or a safer way to allow individual developers to use tokens for one off maintenance tasks or troubleshooting sessions.
One time products will now be handled much better in smart order-based projects.
From now on any product that is set to a ship once frequency will be marked as owned as soon as the order for it is generated. Previously we kept these products shown as active in Firmhouse Portal and Firmhouse Self Service Center which is could lead to confusion for your customer.
In addition, this fixes an issue that Shopify sometimes returned the wrong shipping costs for a recurring order, because it was still treating previous ship once products as active.
