Recurring income is the difference between a business you can plan and a business you have to rebuild every month. Here is how it works, in plain language.
Turning it on
Recurring is set per package, not for the whole site.
Go to Real Estate, then Packages, and open a package. Scroll to the block called Mollie Settings.
Set Payment Type to Recurring / Subscription.
That is the whole setup. Everything else happens by itself.
What actually happens
The plugin explains it directly on that screen, and it is worth understanding, because everything else in this category follows from it.
The first payment creates a mandate.
Your customer pays with iDEAL, or a card, or PayPal. That payment does two things at once: it pays you, and it gives permission for future payments to be collected from their account. That permission is called a mandate.
Every payment after that uses the mandate.
Renewals are collected automatically, by SEPA Direct Debit, card or PayPal, depending on how they first paid.
Your customer does nothing. They are not asked to approve anything, they do not get sent to their bank again, and they do not have to remember to pay you. The money simply arrives.
The thing that catches everyone
If your customer paid the first time with iDEAL, the renewals are not collected by iDEAL. They are collected by SEPA Direct Debit.
iDEAL cannot do recurring payments by itself. It sets up the mandate, and then steps aside.
This means SEPA Direct Debit has to be switched on in your Mollie account, even though your customer never sees it, never chooses it, and would not recognise the name.
Go to your Mollie dashboard, then Settings, then Payment methods, and switch on SEPA Direct Debit.
If you skip this, your first payments will work beautifully and your renewals will silently never happen. You will not find out for a month. This is the single most common cause of “my subscriptions are not renewing”, and it is entirely preventable.
Your customer needs a method that can subscribe
Only twelve of our thirty payment methods can carry a subscription.
iDEAL, Bancontact, card, PayPal, Apple Pay and SEPA Direct Debit can. Google Pay, TWINT, BLIK and Bank Transfer cannot.
The Payment methods tab labels each one, so you never have to remember which is which.
If everything you offer is one-time only, a customer will reach your checkout for a renewing package and find no way to subscribe.
Lifetime packages cannot renew
If a package has Never Expire ticked, it never ends, so there is nothing to renew.
Set it to recurring anyway and the plugin will tell you plainly: it will be charged once, and access will never expire, whatever the billing period says.
That is not a bug. It is the only sensible reading of “lifetime”.
How long a cycle lasts
The Billing Period and Billing Frequency on the package decide this.
1 and Month is monthly. 1 and Year is yearly. 3 and Month is quarterly.
Your customer is charged once per cycle, automatically, until they cancel.