Continuing here then.

First of all I see no reason to set a different first period than the next one as you have in your screenshot.

If you have a calendar year with same first/followup periods you should see in your plan pricing tab the

Bonus time before expiry (for calendar-based durations):

parameter.
This is used to tag on some period in case of subscription during the end of your calendar year.
E.g., you can set this to 2 months to indicate that if someone subscribes during the last 2 months of the calendar year these months are free and he would be paying for the next calendar year. So if someone subscribes in November then he would be ok for end of next december at same cost.

To give automatic discounts based on period subscribed you need to setup promotions.
Please study the chapters in the CBSubs documentation about this.

So lets say for example that you need to give a 90% discount if someone subscribes in November of your physical calendar year. Without a promotion and without a bonus setup (see previous paragraph) this user would pay full price for only one+ month.

You can create an automatic promotion (no coupon code needed) that is conditional on the order period being between 2013-11-01 and 2013-12-01.

You can also program your promotion to automatically display the right price (with strike-through) on your registration / subscription pages.

Please study the documentation first and experiment and if you need further help after that you can followup here.

zen wrote: I have gone through the documentation on Promotion.

To recap, my prorated membership fee system is as follows:

Full amount: $160 (1 year: Jan - Dec)
Jan-Mar: $160 (no discount)
Apr: 140 ($20 discount)
May: 127 ($13 discount) ...

So I'm setting up a Promotion - my understanding now is that I should set up a fixed amount discount for each month (Apr, May,...) with different start/end dates of promotion validity, which will pull up a corresponding discount amount depending on the time of the year.

How can I make this promotion validity period repeat each year with the same conditions? Or am I approaching this in a wrong way?

(PS: This discount only applies to newly registering users. After becoming the registered user, they all pay the full amount for the coming year)

Well, you could do what you proposed and just put a validity period for each promotion and make sure that periods do not overlap.

My initial suggestion would be to use conditional criteria based on order date instead of playing with the validity.

In both cases you would need to manually update your dates (validity or conditional) every year.

Only other alternative would be to use a CB Query field (Professional membership required) and create a query field that return the order date month and use it in your conditional comparison.