Anyone know how to make a Stripe subscription charge a card automatically on future period payments using the new PaymentsIntent SCA approach?
Stripe's docs are in need of major pruning. I've never seen such convoluted and confusing docs as these ones.
One of the confusing parts is where they say in the docs for PaymentsIntents:
confirmation_method:
automatic
(Default) PaymentIntent can be confirmed using a publishable key. After next_actions are handled, no additional confirmation is required to complete the payment.
manual
All payment attempts must be made using a secret key. The PaymentIntent returns to the requires_confirmation state after handling next_actions, and requires your server to initiate each payment attempt with an explicit confirmation.
If I put automatic, the handleCardAction doesn't work anymore on the front end. If it has to be manual, does that mean that all future recurring payments (say Month 2, 3, etc) will need some kind of SCA confirmation by the user?
I haven't found any elements examples for paymentintents and subscriptions with SCA and varying plans and prices not pre-set on the backend as they depend on each individual's parameters.
If I use manual and handleCardAction, the subscription stays incomplete, despite the payment going through. If I use confirmCardPayment, the SCA popup never shows.
Looking further into the subscription and intent objects, I noticed that a new subscription created on the server comes with its own paymentIntent object. So does it mean one has to stop creating a separate paymentIntent with own id? If you do, it doesn't work for completing the subscription, which stays as incomplete.
However, the subscription's paymentIntent has a confirmation_method set as automatic by default -- this results in an error after SCA on the frontend: "You cannot confirm this PaymentIntent because it has already succeeded after being previously confirmed". Interesting, why did it ask for the SCA then in the status: "requires_action"?? Are we supposed to change manually the confirmation_method on a subscription to "manual"??
All this is quite confusing how to make subscription / paymentIntent work with SCA.
My logic is simple: user customises a subscription and enters card details, all of which gets sent to the server => Server creates a new plan, product, customer and subscription => Sends intent (from Subscription?) back to FE => If required, SCA is performed and the subscription is confirmed. Is this not how it's supposed to be done? I don't have pre-set plans as they can vary. I just need the ability to charge a user automatically the same amount they paid for the next period.
The examples and docs I've seen so far don't address the above use case. If anyone knows how to do it or can point to an example of how stripe elements and paymentIntents work with SCA and subscriptions that actually works and activates the subscription?
Stripe has a complete guide to fixed-price Subscriptions with Elements that sounds like it covers what you're trying to do.
When you're working with Stripe Billing (Subscriptions and Invoices) you rarely need to interact with the underlying Payment Intents; those are an implementation detail inside of each Invoice.
Related
for my subscription based product I want to have a possibility to subscribe and enter payment details at once with stripe and struggle with that with the api.
In https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/build-subscriptions?ui=elements I see an option to create a subscription with payment_behavior='default incomplete' and then enter the details to confirm the payment intent. So far so good. However if I create the subscription like that even before the customer confirms payment details stripe already generates an invoice which is not really what I want before final confirmation by customer.
Options I see:
create setupintent, have this filled by customer via elements and then have the customer subscribe. Technically works nicely but for a sales and customer perspective is not good as it has two steps thus probably reduces conversion.
create the subscription in the background before final subscription confirmation by customer and use the clientsecret of it to pass back to browser and then have customer enter his payment data and submit that and finish the setup of subscription and payment info. Technically works - however I realize that when I create the subscription to get the clientsecret to pass to elements before the customer enters his payment data and confirms the subscription the subscription is not only created but an invoice too - which would be really, i.e. an invoice created before customers really confirms the contract
create setupintent and submit it via elements and in metadata of it add the info of product that customers wants so that when the paymentmethod gets created and I get webhook event I do the booking of the product given in metainfo. May however mean the customer gets to success page but the webhook has not notified yet and thus the customer is not really subscrubed at the point in time but gets a success message he is
same as 3 except do not pass info via metadata but via successUrl parameters which refers to and endpoint at my backend which upon being called after setupintent was setup will do the subscription and then redirect to my frontend which shows success page. That seems like a error prone workaround however.
Create a workflow which is a 2 step sign up and asks for paymentinfo, sets that up and then brings customer to a final confirmation page where the submit triggers subscription creation. Seems a bit complicated from a user flow, but so far probably the best option?
Any better options?
Cheers
Tom
ps: Interestingly enough on discord stripe support told me #2 is the way to go - find it hard to believe ...
As far as I know, there isn't a workaround for this unfortunately. It is just how Subscriptions API is designed by Stripe. You can learn more about that here where they talk about "how subscriptions work".
I am updating my billing page which used Stripe JS V2 tokens and the Charges API (Subscriptions). The new(er) Payment Element looks slick from a future proofing standpoint, but am I understanding it correctly that the Customer object must be created prior to populating the payment form?
I only create the Customer once the payment token is obtained and a user has a clear intent to purchase after evaluating during a trial period. Otherwise my Stripe Dashboard is overrun with "empty" trial users that never sign up (I only have around a 10% signup rate from account creation). I guess this is mostly just a personal peeve, but I also just don't like to share user data and figured this way I would only be sharing with a third party once they become actual customers of mine.
Since a Subscription cannot be created without providing a Customer as part of the required parameters, am I stuck using the Card Element and the older Charges API if I don't create a Customer for every user in my system?
You really should just create a Customer up front. It will be required if you want to use trials with Subscriptions and will be cleaner in the long run.
For a workaround, which I would not overall recommend, you could use a SetupIntent with Payment Element to collect the customer's payment method without actually creating a Customer object. Then you can later create the Customer object and attach the PaymentMethod that was previously collected and then create the Subscription.
We are working on a service that can start a subscription later in the future: users say today they want the service, but it actually starts some days later.
We are now collecting the payment method through a SetupIntent, which allows the user to verify they own card, but it actually doesn't verify the credit availability. When we collected the payment method, we create a scheduled subscription with the verified payment method; then, when the subscription starts, Stripe uses that payment method to collect money.
It happens, sometimes, that users do not have enough credit to pay for the service when the subscription starts. Otherwise, it also happens that, when Stripe tries to get money, the customer's bank requires 3D-secure verification.
Since our subscriptions start at midnight, we would like to avoid having to involve users again in the payment process.
So, we thought: would it be possible to immediately collect the payment method through an hold on a PaymentIntent and confirm that hold only when the subscription starts? I can't find a way to do this with Stripe (don't know if it exists). It seems impossible, with Stripe, to generate a PaymentIntent (with capture_method set to manual) for a scheduled subscription.
Do you have some ideas on how we can avoid payment problems when the subscription starts?
Otherwise, it also happens that, when Stripe tries to get money, the
customer's bank requires 3D-secure verification.
This shouldn't be the case if you complete any required 3DS authentication as a part of the SetupIntent confirmation flow. Call confirmCardSetup whilst the user is present and that way the payment method is successfully verified and can be used to process off-session payments for your subscription as you need.
You can use Stripe to place a hold on a card, but this generally doesn't apply to the use case you've described.
I found a workaround for this by first creating a paymentIntent with setup_future_usage="off_session" and capture_method="manual" to first place a hold and save the paymentMethod, and then, only after capturing this paymentIntent, creating a subscription using the newly saved paymentMethod with billing_cycle_anchor that equals your subscription's interval from now.
This way it's like your customer has paid for the first interval using the paymentIntent, but will be charged from the second interval using the subscriptions API, which allows you to cancel the hold on the first payment and not create a subscription if something goes wrong.
I've been reading Stripe's api documentation (v3) and it's not apparent to me when to use Stripe's Invoice vs PaymentIntent objects. From reading the documentation, here's what I understand:
Stripe sees payment intents being the primary way of facilitating payments through their API going forward and Charges will be deprecated at some point.
Processing an Invoice creates a PaymentIntent under the hood and and initiates payment right away. What I don't understand is why is there no destination account field for the Invoice? If the Invoice is defaulted to be sent to the platform's Stripe account (this is an assumption I am making since there is no destination field), why there is an application_fee_amount field which is essentially the platform's "cut" of the transaction?
A PaymentIntent allow you to specify a destination account while taking an "application" or "platform" fee so you don't have to generate a transfer yourself.
A PaymentIntent and Invoice can be processed at time of creation or deferred until later in your payment lifecycle.
My use case requires me to conduct payments between two parties and take a "platform fee" for each transaction. I have successfully done this by creating a PaymentIntent and using the connected Customer account's credit card on file and populating the transfer_data field with the amount to send to the 2nd party involved in the transaction.
I started looking into Stripe's invoicing api since I am planning on building an invoicing solution for my platform and thought it'd be best to leverage what Stripe has to offer, but I'm failing to see a benefit for me to leverage it since I also need to keep track of transaction ids for the payment intents and taxes based on zip code (it looks like Stripe doesn't do this automatically so I might be out of luck here).
I couldn't find a way to get a transactionId for processing an Invoice but I see that the chargeId gets returned as part of the response when you confirm a PaymentIntent (https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_intents/confirm).
So the questions I have are:
Why is there no destination account field for the Invoice? Does it automatically get send to the platform's Stripe account and require you to manually create a transfer?
Is there an easy way to get a transactionId from an Invoice?
Is there a way to get a transactionId when creating a PaymentIntent and setting the confirm=true so the PaymentIntent gets processed immediately?
For a platform that will have an invoicing flow and facilitate transactions on behalf of two parties, is it recommended to use payment intents, invoicing, or both?
What's the difference between a charge and transaction? When paying an Invoice, a charge id gets returned in the response but when paying a payment intent, a transaction id gets returned.
Thanks in advance!
You can think of invoices as subsets of payment intent, kind of the same way subscriptions are subsets of invoices.
What I don't understand is why is there no destination account field for the Invoice?
Actually there is one, but the field is transfer_data[destination]. Also, note that whenever an invoice is finalized, it will contain a payment intent, which is expandable, and with which you should be able to solve most of the issues you rose in your question.
To sum up:
Yes there is, as explained above.
Expand the invoice's payment intent object.
I'm not used to work with transactions, but I guess you could leverage their metadata to reference your invoice or vice verse to help you retrieve the need object in needed time.
As explained above, their is not dichotomy between those, if your invoicing your clients, the you should use stripe's invoicing system.
From what I see in the docs, transactions only concern purchase 'internal' to stripe, with issued cards. Charges are the attempts stripe will make to charge your bank account through the network, when a charge succeeds, the payment intent status is set to succeeded otherwise the payment intent might attempt more charges or stop trying at some point, and the payment intent will be set to canceled more about payment intent statuses here. In short payment intents are a subset of charges.
I hope this helped and didn't come too late, the answer might still be improve in the future, if others edit it or as I will learn more about stripe's issuing product.
I've making a SaaS that allows customers to subscribe to a plan, and use coupons at the checkout stage. The coupons give the customers X% off for X months, and by default, everyone gets a 7 day trial when they subscribe.
What is confusing me is the documentation. In one section it says that you should create SetupIntents to take a payment and elsewhere it says to use tokens.
I'm in the middle of coding the payment flow, but I just wanted to check to see if my logic and understanding is correct. Could anyone validate the below?
Customer enters card number and coupon
Call Stripe, get token for card
Send token and coupon to server
Create Stripe customer with token
Create Subscription with discount and pass customer ID
What has now happened is an authorisation attempt was made. If SCA is required, then the subscription status is incomplete and the latest invoice payment intent status requires action.
At this point, I can redirect my user to the SCA Flow using handleCardPayment() to prompt 3DS, and once complete the subscription status is then active.
If the invoice payment fails for any reason, then the subscription state is incomplete and the payment intent requires has a payment action required status. At this point, I should present my customer with the React Elements form again, and call the stripe.invoices.pay endpoint with the new card token
Going forwards, all subscription charges should not need further SCA approval, however if the customer changes plan or the bank requests it, then I can point my user back through the SCA Flow process
A diagram of the flow is here: Green is UI, Orange is Server, Blue is Stripe
Is there anything I have missed or misunderstood here? I've been reading about creating SetupIntents and PaymentIntents, but I'm not sure I need this?
If you are creating subscriptions using the Stripe Billing product they handle creating the PaymentIntent(if you are taking a payment immediately) or a SetupIntent (if you are setting up a trial or metered billing). All that you really have to do different is handleCardPayment (for payments) or handleCardSetup (for setting up trials and metered billing). This section in the docs is pretty good.
If you are not using billing they have a video on their Stripe Developers Youtube channel which may help clear up any confusion.
Hope this helps :)
Welcome fellow sufferer, cards and tokens are implemented in Stripe Charges API which is not SCA compilant. If you want use Stripe for payments inside the EU you should use payment intents.
Card tokens are also allowed for creating payment intents.
But if you want reduce the number of necessary authentications you should use setup intents (with usage = "off-session") for creating payment methods and not card tokens.
I have a lot of old customers who have still registered with the Charges API. I use the following strategy:
New customers always register via Setup Intents and Payment Methods.
Old customers use the Charges API until their tokens become invalid. Then they must also use setup intents and payment methods.
Of course, the customers do not notice much of it.
In summary, I would always use payment methods and setup intents for new customers and card updates. Only with the setup intents can you ensure that your customers have to authenticate themselves as rarely as possible.
EDIT: The crucial point is off-session payments that occur with subscriptions. The Stripe procedure is described here: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/cards/saving-cards#saving-card-without-payment