AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

While testing subscriptions, we noticed a curious behavior.

If someone places an order as Authorize-only, the subscription is not activated. Subscriptions are only activated upon full payment so this makes sense.

Say the admin goes into the order 3 days later and captures the payment, the subscription is now activated like it should.

Except the first payment date is now 3 days in the past. Activating a subscription does not reset the Next Payment date.

Shouldn't the date be reset to the current date of activation?

In our implementation we took order date as base. This means we calculate the dates regardless of payment capture. Your point is interesting, the idea of this calculation sounds subjective though. Maybe this process should be configurable where merchant should be able to dictate how to calculate the payment dates.

BTW capturing the payment after three days was hypothetical case or its how your process is working in this particular case?

You know if you make it one way, somebody is going to want it the other way sooner or later

Activation Start Date Mode: Order Date/Payment Date/Activation Date

Ideally, another flag would open a lot of doors:
Activate on Payment: Yes/No

Brambleberry wants to sell "club" memberships. Basically people sign up for months to join a club that starts on Jan 1. So they sell the subscription product several weeks in advance. But they don't want it immediately activated even though payment is received.

If we had a flag for activate on payment, then on Jan 1 they can go into Mange Subscriptions, find all the inactive ones for that plan and click a button "Activate". Since sub plan would have start date mode set to activation date, the subs would all start Jan 1 and everyone in the club would be aligned to the same schedule.

The idea of having activation mode makes sense. Thanks for providing with the example I will open a discussion in our logs to consider the possibility to having such configuration and its impacts.