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Try and buy explained
Try and buy explained

What is a try and buy sales model and how does it work via Firmhouse.

Michiel Sikkes avatar
Written by Michiel Sikkes
Updated over 3 months ago

What is try and buy?

Try and buy is a combined subscription and purchase model to sell your products. Customers first subscribe to your products for a certain amount of time and then can choose to purchase your product for a certain amount. For example, a customer pays €40 per month for the duration of 3 months. Then purchasing your product for the remaining price of €400.

The try and buy model is especially interesting for more expensive products where the customer first needs to feel or experience the value before purchasing. Especially for customers that are holding off their purchase decision because they can't see or feel the product, try and buy can be an exceptional way of buying.

How does try and buy work with Firmhouse?

With Firmhouse you can quite easily sell your products in a try and buy model. This is roughly how it works from a functional standpoint.

  1. Your customer starts a monthly subscription for your product via the usual checkout.

  2. As soon as you ship out the product you create an asset for the product and assign it to the customer. You can read more about creating and assigning assets in Asset tracking.

  3. Every time the monthly subscription fee is charged you update the purchase price of the asset. Usually with every month someone is charged for the product the purchase price is also reduced. Either linearly or via some other formula or mapping. Read more in Setting up try and buy.

  4. The customer logs into their self service center and purchases the asset via the Firmhouse asset purchase flow.
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  5. The subscription is automatically stopped after the customer completes their purchase.

Please note: The purchase offer widget will not be shown, when the subscription still has outstanding invoices!

Prerequisites and caveats

  • The asset purchase flow is currently an early access preview feature. Please get in touch with our support to enable it for your project.

  • To set up try and buy, you need to use the Asset tracking features in Firmhouse.

  • Purchasing an asset will automatically stop the subscription. So any other products in the subscription are also impacted.

  • Only one product per subscription can be bought. There is currently no option to purchase multiple assets in one go.

  • You need to set up an external service to calculate and set a purchase price on each asset via our API.
    This gives you full flexibility in what kind of pricing model you want to offer. For example: Some of our customers use Airtable to easily maintain a mapping between months subscribed and the purchase price of their assets.
    See Setting up try and buy and Using Pipedream to automate purchase price updates for a step-by-step guide and samples.

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