We’re gradually rolling out support for full one time checkouts via Firmhouse Checkout. We invite all our merchants who are interested to get in touch with us and join the private beta.

Adding better 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.

This article explains what changes you can expect when joining the private beta. And what we have in store for you with future improvements.

The private beta will roll out for merchants using the "Smart Order-based" project type first. This means that merchants that have a rental, lease, or Product as a Service business model unfortunately cannot join this private beta yet.

Technically, Firmhouse already supports full one-time purchase carts. However they currently show up as subscription in the Firmhouse portal, analytics, etc. without a way to distinguish full subscription or hybrid checkouts from only one-time product checkouts.

With the one time purchase feature enabled, carts that consist of only "one time shipment" products will be treated as one time purchases. When at least one of the items in a cart is set to have a recurring order schedule the cart is treated as a subscription.

Customers that check out a full one time purchase cart get the new status One-time purchase. You can filter on these new status so that you can distinguish one-time purchases from regular subscriptions. Exports and API also reflect this new status as one_time_purchase or ONE_TIME_PURCHASE.

When someone places an order as one-time purchase they cannot upgrade their initial order to a subscription. It is also not possible to add any products to their order via the self service center.

We are considering designing flows so that when a customer places a one-time purchase, it becomes easy to upgrade or upsell those customers to getting a subscription. At the moment this is not possible yet without the customer doing a fully new Checkout that includes any desired subscription products.

With the multi-accounts feature enabled in you Firmhouse project combining subscriptions and one-time purchases looks as follows:

Currently we show the same payment methods to customers checking out a full one-time cart and to those who are checking out subscription products. The effect is that payment methods that are only suitable for one-time purchase payments are still hidden from the payment step.

We are exploring ways to make this customizable so that you can offer more payment methods to customers checking out one-time purchases.