Question

How to offer permanent discounts on subscriptions?

  • 21 June 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 206 views

Badge +2

How to offer permanent discounts on subscriptions?

We currently offer two subscription plans, monthly, and yearly.  Everything is setup and works fine so far.  What we would like to do, is for our affiliate program, offer a % discount to people are referred to the app using a discount code.  We track and setup this separately, so we can pull a different “offer” from revcat.  We’re just not sure how to configure this so that users can’t see all of our subscription pricing from the native subscription management pages.  

I saw that iOS offers “discount codes”, but we aren’t giving unique one-time use discount codes to customers (many customers will show up with the same “referral code”).  If someone gets referred to the app, we want to show them a separate set of subscriptions.  However, on iOS, it seems like the user can switch between all available subscriptions via the iOS subscriptions manager.  We don’t want to show (or allow switching to) these other plans for users that didn’t come through the referral path.

To simplify the question, how do you handle when you want to offer a permanent subscription discount to a certain group of users?

Do you create a 2nd set of subscriptions on iOS / play store that reflect the cheaper price, or do you have some way of doing this with discount codes / offers?  If so, how do you restrict users from manually switching from the “full price” to the discounted price via the native iOS subscription selection?

Thanks for the help!  

Looked around at a number of other similar threads, but none seemed to answer this question specifically.


4 replies

Userlevel 2
Badge +6

However, on iOS, it seems like the user can switch between all available subscriptions via the iOS subscriptions manager.  We don’t want to show (or allow switching to) these other plans for users that didn’t come through the referral path.

 

My suggestion would be to use a completely different subscription group for the discounted products (and show them appropriately). The user will only be seeing the products in that subscription group when going to the iOS subscription page.

Badge +2

However, on iOS, it seems like the user can switch between all available subscriptions via the iOS subscriptions manager.  We don’t want to show (or allow switching to) these other plans for users that didn’t come through the referral path.

 

My suggestion would be to use a completely different subscription group for the discounted products (and show them appropriately). The user will only be seeing the products in that subscription group when going to the iOS subscription page.

Thanks - that is helpful.  And then in RevCat we could just show a different offering that has the products in the “discounted subscription group”?

Userlevel 2
Badge +6

Exactly, follow an approach like the one described here: 

 

Hi @onRoutine - We’re attempting to do exactly the same as you: maintain a set of branded affiliate codes which when redeemed, entitle the customer to a discount on their app subscription.

I couldn’t figure out how to make this work on app store purchases so instead we steer customers to Stripe when they have an affiliate code instead of in-app. Needless to say this is cumbersome and confusing for customers.

I understand from your post and Miguel’s reply that you figured out how to make the discounted subscriptions available to customers with discount codes in app, but my question is, how and where are you actually collecting the affiliate code from the customer in-app? Are you collecting the code during sign-up/account create or later in funnel? Any insights you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Reply