Subscription Data

The system builds on WooCommerce subscriptions, adding the following key data elements to support physical journals:

  1. Issue Tracking
    • start_issue_number: First issue number in subscription
    • expiry_issue_number: Last issue number in subscription
    • copies_owed: Number of issues remaining to be shipped
    • includes_current_issue: Whether subscription includes current issue
  2. Financial Tracking
    • deferred_amount: Amount of revenue deferred for future issues
    • initial_entitlement_amount: Value of initial entitlements
    • renewal_entitlement_amount: Value of renewal entitlements
  3. Shipping Configuration
    • issue_shipping_basis: Can be ‘active’, ‘digital’, or ‘copies’1
    • shipping_soundex: Phonetic encoding of shipping name for duplicate detection
    • shipping_address_key: Normalized shipping address for duplicate detection
  4. Status Fields
    • benefactor_subscription: Indicating whether the subscription is premium (benefactor) or standard2
    • sku: Product SKU associated with subscription
  5. Gift Features
    • gift_notification_date: When to notify gift recipient

Understanding Deferred Revenue

We earn revenue on the print Journals when they are shipped, not when the subscription is purchased. We refer to this as ‘deferred revenue’.

So, e.g. if a subscription is purchased for $90:

  • The subscription order is marked complete
  • The $90 goes into the deferred revenue for that subscription
  • When we ship a copy of the Journal for that subscription, we earn some of the deferred revenue

The calculation on how much we earn per shipment is current deferred revenue / number of copies remaining. So, e.g. for the first copy pulled for a subscription, the deferred revenue is $90, the copies remaining is 4, the amount earned for when that copy is shipped would be $90/4 = $22.50.

  1. ‘copies’ are the annual subscriptions, where Journals are shipped if copies are owed on the subscription. ‘active’ are the monthly subscriptions on The Surfer’s Journal, that are shipped as long as the subscription is active. ↩

  2. The term ‘benefactor’ goes back to the launch of The Golfer’s Journal. We now use the term ‘premium’; and should amend this flag to ‘premium’ (@todo development task) ↩