Change current domains renewal period

[xyzulu]

So.. at the start of next month 100's for domains I currently manage for my customers will now be available for a single year registration instead of the current 2 year only registration.

Now, I have no issues offering the domains to new customers on a single year renewal option.. but any suggestions on how to change all of my currently active domains which are on a 2 year cycle to 1 year cycle at the next due date?

[brian!]

1 hour ago, xyzulu said:

Now, I have no issues offering the domains to new customers on a single year renewal option.. but any suggestions on how to change all of my currently active domains which are on a 2 year cycle to 1 year cycle at the next due date?

first thought would be why bother to change them ? I ran into a similar issue years ago when Nominet removed their member discounted pricing for 2-years registrations (now as per most other TLDs, they charge the same price per year)... but (nearly) all our domain customers were used to renewing their .uk domains every 2 years and didn't want to change to paying annually.... it gives the client 50% fewer invoices to deal with over the two years, and brings in more income to your business (in the short-term)... if they renew annually tomorrow, there's no guarantee they'll renew this time next year... but with a 2-year renewal, that concern doesn't really matter... they've got their domain for that period, and you've got the income.

it's probably worth adding that the client, if they wish to renew early, will have the option to change the renewal length themselves via their Domain Renewals page (assuming that you're using v7.5+ which it looks like you are)...

Quote

Improved Domain Renewals Experience - WHMCS 7.5 includes changes to the client area domain renewal experience including a new unified page for ordering renewals via the shopping cart, live real-time cart preview, more informative and helpful information display, domain search for customers with lots of domains + new grace and redemption period information and pricing display.

basically, they will be able to change their renewal period to any year length that you have priced in their currency and generate the renewal invoices immediately...

but to get to your specific question about you wanting to change the renewal period for them, the obvious solution would be the Bulk Pricing Updater - but don't... no please don't even think about using it... it's bugged and I wouldn't trust using it on a dev, let alone a live production site.

if you were doing something minor, and/or generally with products, you might get away with it... but for anything domain specific, grab yourself the longest bargepole you can find and don't be tempted to use it...

as you can read in the above thread, the issue is how it handles domain updates... if there was a separate TLD field in the tbldomains table, then this wouldn't be an issue (because then you could easily identify which domains to update), but because there isn't such a field, then the addon seemingly just searches for domains containing the TLD search term... e.g if you search for .uk, it finds .co.uk; .org.uk and .uk domains etc.. now if your issue only affects one TLD whose name bears no relation to any other TLD (e.g .xyzulu or .whmcs to give two silly/impossible examples), then the updater might work... i'm not saying that i'd use it, but it might work without issue.

as per the thread, i'd be more inclined to do it as a SQL query... though depending on whether this issue applies to multiple TLDs with differing pricing, you may have to run multiple queries - but basically, you are looking to change the 'registrationperiod' and 'recurringamount' fields in the table of the applicable domains... in your query, you know that 'registrationperiod' will equal 2 and then it's a case of deciding what the one year price should be and setting that amount within 'recurringamount', and setting 'registrationperiod' to 1... you'd also need to run the query before any of the invoices had already been generated - so do it long before the renewal invoice generation will be triggered by the cron for any of these domains.

 

[xyzulu]

Thanks for the info.. I'll keep the sql changes in mind as this is probably the safest way to go if needed.

I'm actually considering just leaving current domains that fall into this category on a 2 years cycle.