CartThrob - Deposit & Installment Payments with special timing

Question

We are evaluating CartThrob for a client's site that has some quirky requirements for recurring charges and the timing of these charges. I'm trying to figure out if CartThrob can provide the necessary functionality, be adapted to meet the requirements, or connect to a payment gateway that has these built in.

Client is selling a product that requires a deposit of $X amount and subsequent installment payments of $Y amount (installment payments are all equal). The deposit must be charged right away, and the installment payments must be charged on the 1st or 15th of the month (recurring monthly for a few months) for accounting reasons.

From the docs, it appears CT (using CT Subscriptions) would allow for the $X deposit to be treated as a trial subscription and the $Y installments to be a set number of rebillings (e.g., 1x per month for 4 total_occurrences). I see that we can set the start date of the subscription; however, I do not see a way to have the trial billed immediately but have the rebillings occur on a different date of the month. (Client is not willing to wait until 1st of 15th to charge deposit.)

Is there a way to do this 'out of the box', or could something simple be coded to update the rebilling date after the deposit is received? We really appreciate any input on this ... and thank you Vector for acquiring CT!

Answer 1

(I lead Development at Vector; thanks for your kind words!)

You could do this pretty easily with an extension that uses CartThrob's hooks-- basically your idea of "something simple be coded to update the rebilling date after the deposit is received". I have to think about a good way to do it natively, which might be possible using some combination of a single-purchase item and a subscription item with the multi-add to cart tag. I can get back to you on that. But regardless, it's doable with the hooks without much trouble (and we can help you write this if you're not comfortable doing it yourself. Just submit a contact request: https://www.cartthrob.com/support/index.php?pg=request).