How coreFORCE handles duplicate subscription purchases

Background

There are often legitimate reasons behind why a customer may purchase a new subscription. Reasons could include that your subscription is product based and the customer is changing which product they would like to receive as part of the subscription. Alternatively, maybe they had to cancel a subscription a while back due to financial reasons and want to pick up at the same or even a higher level subscription.

Legacy Functionality and Changes

In the past, if a customer had an expired membership and purchased a new one, coreFORCE would reactivate the old one and move the date ahead. 

  
Since June 2022, coreFORCE creates a new membership if a customer renews the inactive (canceled, expired) membership.

  
The idea behind this change is to show the subscription renewal history. For instance, a customer had a membership in 2020 but then canceled it. Then started it again in 2022. Before the update, coreFORCE would show the membership was active the whole time since 2020. Now the client sees both subscriptions: the previous one with an end date and the current one with the start date with a gap between them. 

The old subscription record remains inactive for the single purpose of showing the client's membership history. But, you can control the creation of duplicate records when creating a new membership by checking the box shown in the image.

New Functionality Process

What happens when a customer purchases a subscription startup product when they already had a subscription:

1. If the subscription does not have "Only one subscription allowed at a time" checked, it will create a duplicate. There are some subscriptions (e.g. for a monthly delivery of a product) where this may be desirable. For membership subscriptions, this is normally not desirable, so memberships should always have "only one subscription allowed at a time" checked.

2. If the previous subscription is inactive, a new subscription record will be created.

3. If the previous subscription expired more than 1 month ago, a new subscription record will be created.

4. If the previous subscription expired within the past month, the old subscription will be continued with an updated expiration date.