Introducing the Subscription Foundation

BigCommerce & Stripe are bringing the Subscription Foundation for Store Owners and Developers convenience…

The Subscription Foundation is the latest open-source application out of the BigCommerce Foundations tool set that “helps you accelerate custom development of specific use cases by leapfrogging the foundational integration points.” The Subscription Foundation is a “subscribe and save” application framework that provides a template to scaffold custom subscription billing and invoicing solutions for your business or client. This framework will fast track builds of custom subscription experiences on the BigCommerce platform, potentially saving you hundreds of hours of development time with a user experience that fits nicely within the BigCommerce control panel.

This suite of open source apps provides enhanced functionality, which connects seamlessly with your store and Stripe account. With the resources included in Foundations, you can build customized subscription plans for your products and take advantage of Stripe’s POS terminals to unify your online and physical stores and connect multiple terminals at a single location.

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How is this Done?

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You can build customized subscription plans using the default integration with Stripe Billing, including authentication, merchant onboarding, subscription product management, subscription creation, and customer-facing subscription management, which can significantly help accelerate your development time. Subscription Foundation will utilize the Channels toolkit, and your custom subscription channel will appear in the Channel Manager view of a store’s control panel, alongside your other sales channels.

Subscription Foundation uses Stripe Connect so that your app can use one single connection to submit payments to the previously configured Stripe accounts of multiple BigCommerce merchants. The integration with Stripe and BigCommerce requires that the app uses two keys to issue charges: (1) the merchant-specific Stripe account’s public key and (2) the app-specific Stripe account’s secret key.

The reason two keys are needed is that for development, you will work with the two aforementioned Stripe accounts; the merchant account, which simulates a pre-existing account, and the App Account which you configure as the app’s dedicated Stripe Connect-enabled account. The two accounts will create the following benefits for the merchant:

1. The merchant can change the Stripe accounts they use without breaking the integration.
2. The merchant’s Stripe account stores all the entire shopper payment history, including subscription and one-time purchases.

Utilizing this type of approach, the Subscription Foundation creates Multi-tenant functionality. During installation, the app UI prompts the merchant to enter the keys for their store’s Stripe account so that the app can initiate an OAuth authorization code grant flow to link the merchant’s Stripe account to the app’s Stripe Connect-enabled account.

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What this means

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1. Build your ideal customer experience, and stand out from competition using Foundations to customize core commerce elements.
2. Win enterprise merchants by offering unique commerce solutions that natively work with BigCommerce and differentiate your services.
3. Get a head start on building your own subscription and POS apps with open sourced apps that eliminate some slower parts of the development process.

When you use Foundations, you’re not limited to the capabilities in off-the-shelf products that may not be up to meeting complex needs. With Stripe, we make it easier for you to build customized, globally scalable solutions for your specific needs without starting from scratch, so you can create your ideal customer experience while saving hundreds of hours in development work.

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What’s next?

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If you want to learn more about how Foundations, powered by BigCommerce and Stripe support your business and customers visit https://www.bigcommerce.com/foundations/ to learn more about Foundations for Stripe Billing and Foundations for Stripe Terminal. With Foundations start turning your biggest ideas into reality, and be sure to check back often for the latest updates.