How to Manage Free Trials

Free trials in Upmind let you offer products or services at no charge for a set period, giving clients a chance to evaluate before committing to a paid subscription. You can control what happens when the trial ends, pair trials with promotional discounts, and automate the process to reduce manual work.

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What is included in this guide

1. How to Enable a Free Trial for a Product
2. Trial Settings Explained
3. Client Experience During a Trial
4. How to Offer a Discount for Trial Continuations
5. How to Auto-Apply a Promotion
6. Trial Automation and Contract Settings
7. Requiring Payment Details for Free Trial Orders

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How to enable a free trial for a product

Before setting up a trial, make sure you have already created a product. If you have not, you can add a new product category and product first.

1. Go to Settings > Product Catalogue (or open Store Catalogue directly).

2. Select an existing product or create a new one.
3. Open the Billing tab, then expand Product Trial.

4. Toggle on Support Trial Period.

You will now see all the trial configuration options described below.

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Trial settings explained

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Forced trial

You can make a trial optional or mandatory (forced).

• If the trial is optional, clients can choose to skip it when placing an order.
• If the trial is forced, all clients ordering that product will start on the trial, with no option to bypass it.

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Trial period duration (in days)

The number of days the free trial lasts before the end-of-trial action is triggered.

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Pre-expired notification (in days)

Set how many days before the trial ends you want to trigger configured actions, for example, sending reminder emails to clients.

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End of trial action

Choose what happens when the trial period finishes.

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Client experience during a trial

When a client is on an active trial, the trial status is visible in their client area. Clients can end the trial early at any time. Doing this triggers the end-of-trial action configured for that product (continue, migrate, or cancel).

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How to offer a discount for trial continuations

If you want to reward clients who choose to continue after a trial with a promotional discount, you can set this up through the Promotions section.

1. Go to Settings > Promotion (found under the products and promotions).

2. Click Add Promotion and configure the promotion details.

3. Choose the promotion type: Custom condition per product, which will apply to an individual promotion per product.

4. Then click on Attach new product.

5. Set the discount as a fixed amount or a percentage of the product price, tick the applicable conditions, and fill in the minimum and maximum quantity.

6. Click Save.
7. Under Mandatory Products, click Manage Product.

8. Tick the conditions that apply to the promotion, and click Save.

9. Set up the Availability and Eligibility rules, tick the applicable conditions, and click Save.

Clients can now use the promotion code when continuing a free trial product or service.

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How to auto-apply a promotion

To automatically apply a promotion without requiring clients to enter a code:

1. Go to Settings > Business Settings (under the E-commerce Settings heading).

2. Scroll down to Applied Promotion.
3. Toggle the setting to ON.

With this enabled, eligible promotions are applied automatically at checkout.

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Trial automation and contract settings

Upmind can automatically suspend, cancel, or terminate trial contracts that become overdue. These settings are found at Settings > Branding and Customisation > Subscription Options > Contract Settings. Configuring these values keeps your trial subscriptions tidy without requiring manual intervention.

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Requiring payment details for free trial orders

Go to Settings > E-commerce Settings > Order Options > Misc. The Require Payment Details for Zero Amount Orders setting controls whether clients must provide a payment method when checking out a free trial (or any 100% discounted order). Setting this to true means that when a basket is converted to an invoice for a free trial, the client must add a saved payment method before completing the order. This makes sure the renewal invoice at the end of the trial can be charged automatically, without any manual follow-up. This is recommended if your end-of-trial action is set to Continue and you want billing to be fully automated.