Handling Domain Renewals for Non-Customers

[cjscott69]

We have customers that only have domain registration services through us. Since these came to us from reseller that went out of business, we don't have these customers in our billing system. What I want to do with WHMCS is allow them to renew their existing domain but neither the domain or the customer is in the system.

 

Since our renewal prices vary by TLD, just adding a single domain registration product won't really work. Adding a product for each distinct renewal price would work, but we can't customize the renewal messages from OpenSRS by TLD so we can't (from the renewal email from OpenSRS) direct them to the exact product they need and we wouldn't trust them to pick the right one--cheapest one, yes

 

It seems like our best option is to add a separate product with a required field for them to enter their domain name for each price point and in our renewal notices from OpenSRS send the user to a page outside WHMCS that grabs the domain name and then redirects them to the appropriate direct order link in WHMCS.

 

Anyone see other ways to do this that works w/in our restrictions?

 

Thanks.

[othellotech]

I think you're over-complicating it

 

# you dont have the clients in your system

- so before you do anything for them (presumably they call or create a ticket or something ?) you need to authenticate they are the registrant and send them to

{yourwhmcs}/register.php to become a client

- *now* you have contact infomation

 

note: you can do this for them if you want to be super friendly, but sometime educating clients into doing *some* of the work themselves is a-good-thing ™

 

# pricing varied by TLD

- WHMCS supports this "out-of-the-box" on the domain configurations page, it doesnt involve a "product" per-se

 

# domains not (yet) in your system

- I'd seriously advise creating a "defunct customer" client in your WHMCS and adding the domains as "transfer" orders with no registrar so that you do have the domains

- a major benefit of that is that when you are eventually contacted and they register.php, you can use the WHMCS "push to another client" feature and move the domain to their account, and then edit the due/expiry/invoice dates according, override the price if you have a specific need to for that domian.client etc

 

the other way to acheive some of what you want is to edit the renewal notices to send them to a *transfer* page in WHMCS - copy your existing orderform templates, change the wording from transfer to "recovery/renewal" etc.

 

if this was me (and we've had to do this a number of times over the years) and the reseller *really* has gone (and you've checked your T&C's and the legality of 3rd party contract breaches with your compnay solicitor etc) is to pre-empt all the problems by pro-actively getting in touch with all these clients - a simple postcard giving details of your company (as they may not actually know who you are if they went through a 3rd party) and a discount voucher to renew their domain early - it works wonders when they think they're saving £1 ....

[cjscott69]

Rob,

 

Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I tend to make things complicated

 

I think we can streamline this for the customer by getting a list of domains that are getting ready to receive the 90 day (first) expiration notice from Tucows and import the customer and set up their domain(s) in WHMCS. Then, in the renewal notice we can tell them to request their password to log in to WHMCS and then they'll be able to select their domain and renew it there.

 

We usually only have less than five renewals due per day so this wouldn't be too much work. I think we could use the API to add the customer and then manually transfer the domain to them and set it up while not invoicing for it.

[othellotech]

good plan