I am planning on integrating stripe into our application. There is a requirement to add multiple subscriptions for a customer (which looks to be possible with stripe). However, after looking at their API, I can't find a way to set which payment method will be used with each subscription. We want to enable a customer to choose two different methods for each of their subscriptions. Looking at the stripe API docs however, it seems that all subscriptions are billed to the default source on the customer. I can't find any way to specify that a specific subscription be billed to a specific payment method...
It is a current limitation of Stripe's API that subscriptions are always billed to the customer's default payment source. If you want to have multiple subscriptions billed to different sources, you'd need to have multiple customer objects, each with a different payment method as its default source, and create the subscriptions on the appropriate customer objects.
EDIT: The above is no longer true! You can now use different sources for different subscriptions, using the default_source parameter.
You can set the default_source of your subscription.
https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/object
default_source:
ID of the default payment source for the subscription. It must belong to the customer associated with the subscription and be in a chargeable state. If not set, defaults to the customer’s default source.
Related
With Stripe, how to use the payment method created from setup intent for multiple customers?
According tp the Create Setup Intent API, it only let us define one customer ID.
param name: customer (optional)
description of this param:
attached to the Customer on successful setup. Payment methods attached
to other Customers cannot be used with this SetupIntent.ID of the Customer this SetupIntent belongs to, ifone exists. If present, the SetupIntent’s payment method will be
TLDR
I want to let the same user to reuse same payment method to subscribe items with different presentment currencies,
I assume I should solve this requirement by directly creating multiple customer objects for a single user, and using create Setup Intent API to attach his/her same payment method for multiple "customer objects".
But, I am not sure if this is possible, therefore I welcome any recommendation for alternative approaches, such as using attach payment method to customers API, or any workarounds.
PS: Detail info (for why I am interested to ask this question)
Business requirement:
My business requirement is that customers have to subscribe to international services that must be presented with different presentment currencies. To makes thing even harder, each customer has to use the same list of saved payment methods to subscribe to services with different presentment currencies in the future. In other words, users should not have to re-enter card info again if they subscribe to items in different presentment currencies.
Limitation of the Stripe API:
Why not just use single customer object for subscribing to services (aka "price" objects) with multiple presentment currency?
I tried and it results in an error. According to this Stripe documentation, it indeed says that each customer can only be used for transactions in single currency.
If the user in my app want to subscribe to another service with another
currency, I need to create new "Customer" object in Stripe.
Why not just use /v1/payment_methods/:pm_id/attach api to attch payment method to multiple customer object?
Because according to this Attact payment method to customer API doc, Stripe does not recommend, yet I do not fully understand the risk of not performing any necessary steps as it warns. Therefore, it is just my risk averse instinct to avoid this.
To attach a new PaymentMethod to a customer for future payments, we
recommend you use a SetupIntent or a PaymentIntent with
setup_future_usage. These approaches will perform any necessary steps
to ensure that the PaymentMethod can be used in a future payment.
This is not supported. A payment method can only be consumed once if not attached, and attaching to a customer counts as a consumption. A PM can only be attached to a single customer, so you'll need to collect the payment details for each.
Stripe recommends using that customer's currency for all presentment to optimize for their experience, though that may not be suitable for all use cases.
I have a long list of old customers (>10K) in Stripe for which I would like to give a new trial period. Is there a way to bulk process those or we have to do that manually one by one?
I guess this depends entirely on what exactly you mean by 'new trial'. Do these customers have pre-existing Stripe subscriptions?
There's really no way to do this via the dashboard. However if there are no pre-existing subscriptions, you could programmatically create subscriptions for each customer object accordingly. You can specify the trial period on the price or on a per subscription basis.
As there are no batch endpoints for these operations, please be wary of the rate limiting if working with the API in this way
I have multiple active subscriptions that were set up by my customers using their credit cards when signing up using intents API for SCA compliability.
Let's assume their cards expire and they want to change the default card they use on all their subscriptions. Until now this was done using the cards API by setting a default card on the customer account or simply updating all the existing subscriptions setting the card as default.
How does this work to be SCA compliant? Do I need to take my customers through a lengthy setup intent process on each of their running subscriptions individually? Or is there a way to create a single setup intent and assign that to all the running subscriptions they might have?
You can set the Customer's invoice_settings.default_payment_method and that will apply to all of the Subscriptions they have - unless you've explicitly set each Subscription's payment method (in which case you'll have to update each of those instead).
I am working with Stripe to manage subscriptions. I would like to delegate payment of a subscription to another customer.
Specifically, I want the customer of the subscription to reap the benefits of a subscription, but assign another customer to pay for it.
Is that possible? If not, what are the possible workarounds? Thanks.
Notes:
Once a subscription is created, an invoice is automatically generated and is not editable according to what I have tried previously
I would like to keep as close to the usual subscription flows as possible, as I don't want to lose out on things such as being able to pro-rate an invoice (which becomes messy if I have to manually craft invoices myself)
I'm integrating Stripe Subscriptions in our workflow, but when creating a subscription with a Customer created with a paymentMethod instead of source I receive the error This customer has no attached payment source.
If I call in the browser createToken() and attach it to the customer in the source field it works.
We integrated one-time payments using the new docs with SCA that use createPaymentMethod() and not createToken(), so our customers are saved with paymentMethod, not source, like explained here:
https://stripe.com/docs/payments/cards/saving-cards-after-payment#save-payment-method
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/customers \
-u sk_test_secret_token \
-d payment_method="{{PAYMENT_METHOD_ID}}"
Furthermore, in the migration guide it says to replace createToken() with createPaymentMethod().
In Scenario 2: Charging customers off-session for their initial payment, I saw the following:
To create subscriptions and charge customers off-session for their
initial payment, you need to:
1) Use CreatePaymentMethod to collect payment information
2) Create a customer using the ID of the PaymentMethod you created
3) Create the subscription
4) Set up error handling using handleCardSetup for authentication failures and handleCardPayment for authorization failures
I followed those steps. I don't create a SetupIntent (just like I don't create it in one-time payments and it works in these cases), and receive the error I said before when trying to create subscriptions.
Is it possible to create subscriptions with a customer with paymentMethod instead of source?
(We reuse cards using the customers created with paymentMethod for one-time payments, so it would be very important to be able to reuse the same customer/card for subscriptions, without the need for the user input data in stripe elements or anything of the sort, because it would break our flow for reusing cards)
I was able to solve it by including the payment method in the field default_payment_method.
This field is described as follows:
ID of the default payment method for the subscription. It must belong
to the customer associated with the subscription. If not set, invoices
will use the default payment method in the customer’s invoice
settings.
So I assumed that it would use the payment method I associated with the customer when not defined. It seems it is not happening, tough, so I needed to pass it explicitly (is it a Stripe bug? or creating the customer with paymentMethod doesn't make it the default payment method in the customer’s invoice settings? I will contact Stripe to make sure).
Update (2019-09-23)
I contacted Stripe asking if this was a bug and they replied:
[...] With that being said though, this wouldn't be a bug on our end, rather
expected behavior.
If you're wanting for the Payment Method that you're adding to the
customer object to be used on subscriptions, or invoices, by default
without specifying the default_payment_method when creating the
subscription then you would want to attach the Payment Method and
specify the invoice_settings.default_payment_method parameter when
updating the customer. This information can be found within our API
reference here:
https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_methods/attach
The parameter to use when updating this can be found on the customer
object itself, here:
https://stripe.com/docs/api/customers/update#update_customer-invoice_settings-default_payment_method
This can also be specified upon customer creation, which can be seen
here:
https://stripe.com/docs/api/customers/create#create_customer-invoice_settings-default_payment_method
Specifying this parameter would indicate that the card being added
would be the default for subscriptions, as well as invoices, so that
the default_payment_method wouldn't need to be specified upon the
subscription, or invoice, creation.