I am new to braintree and I am implementing a braintree payment gateway for my nodeJs app. I have few concerns when it come to application testing.
How can I change the period of one billing cycle. Currently its limited to minimum of 1 month. If it is not changeable what is the workaround for testing multiple billing cycle transactions ??
PS: I did refer to this how-can-i-change-subscription-period-on-braintree but a valid answer can not be found.
My next question is related to the webhooks in Braintree. When a webhook is triggered for successful charge for subscription it returns a Subscription object which a transaction array which includes all the transactions for that subscription. Is there a way to filter out the data for the transaction which the webhook was triggered for ? It says the array is sorted. Does that mean that 0th position of the transaction array is the last transaction made ??
Braintree Subscription object reference
Since the test environment does not let us change the billing cycle time I have to wait a month to test this. And if there is a better way to do handle this please advice me on it.
Full disclosure: I work at Braintree. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact support.
It’s not possible to create a subscription billing period shorter than a month in sandbox or production. The previous answer linked in your question — creating a subscription with a 1-day trial period — is a good way to test subscription billing transactions.
The array of transactions inside a subscription object is sorted by creation date with most recent first, so the first transaction within a subscription returned in a webhook notification will be the transaction that triggered the webhook.
You can also take a look at our webhooks testing page for examples of how to generate sample webhook notifications.
Related
I know I can pre-auth a stripe subscription with a trial period. I want to pre-auth the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, nth subscription payment. The info we are sending out is time critical and if their subscription lapses due to NSF or something else, it would be nice for them if they could rectify the problem BEFORE it lapses.
There is a pending invoice you can get for a subscription, and you can create a payment intent with an invoice ID so that when the invoice is paid, the payment intent (that captured the money) will be used to collect the money. BUT the pending invoice doesn't have an ID until one or 2 hours before they try to collect the money which is 3-4 days too late.
Has anyone figured out how to pre-auth subscription payments other than the first one?
Is there a subscription engine I could use (with stripe/paypal/venmo) that would mean I could quit using the deficient stripe subscription system?
Subscription invoices don't exist until the renewal of the billing cycle, and the underlying payment intent is created by the invoice. It's not supported to "pre-auth" subscription payments. Instead, you need to handle payment failures when those occur, optionally by letting Stripe handle that for you.
If you want to have successful payment in advance of some time-sensitive event, then I'd suggest one of two alternatives:
Shift your billing cycle to invoice 3-4 days ahead of what you have set now, allowing you time to recover from payment failures before the delivery timing.
Alternatively you would implement your own recurring payments using saved payment details. You would similarly want to authorize the payment ahead of time to allow for recovery. You could optionally use manual capture to defer capture until the time of delivery.
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.
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.
On Stripe's API docs the value returned when attempting to create a subscription on a customer is described as follows:
The newly created subscription object if the call succeeded. If the customer has no card or the attempted charge fails, this call returns an error (unless the specified plan is free or has a trial period).
From this, I am assuming that if the first attempted charge fails (and an error is returned) this means that the subscription has not been created?
I am wanting to be able to create subscriptions on customers who may not yet have any billing sources added and as soon as they add a billing source the first payment will be processed. Is there a way to accomplish this?
From this, I am assuming that if the first attempted charge fails (and an error is returned) this means that the subscription has not been created?
Yes, that's correct.
I am wanting to be able to create subscriptions on customers who may not yet have any billing sources added and as soon as they add a billing source the first payment will be processed. Is there a way to accomplish this?
You could create a subscription with a plan for $0, or create a sub with a trial using trial_end to create a 'free' subscription.
As far as "as soon as they add a billing source the first payment will be processed." -- you'd need to create logic to handle this on your own. When a user adds a payment source you could update their subscription ending the trial (trial_end=now), or moving them to a paid plan.
https://stripe.com/docs/api#update_subscription
I have a number of users who are currently subscribers to a monthly subscription.
For business reason, I want to be able to
1) Charge the customer when he decides to subscribe to our plan
2) Let the subscription become effective a number of days after the purchase
Currently a charge is immediately attempted when a subscription is added to a customer in stripe.
I want to stick to the stripe subscription because a) I still want to have stripe to manage subscription for me in future dates, and b) I have written a lot of code for the subscription model.
Is it feasible at all to demarcate the charge/invoice and the subscription start date?
You can control the time when the subscription actually starts (i.e. when Stripe will start billing the customer) by using the trial_end parameter in your subscription creation request. Simply set the value of the parameter to the timestamp of the exact time you wish Stripe to start automatically billing the customer.
If I understand your desired payment flow correctly, you'd want to do something like this when a customer signs up:
Collect and tokenize the customer's payment information (using Elements or Checkout).
Using the resulting token, create a customer object and save the resulting customer ID in your database.
Create a one-off charge using the customer object for the first payment.
Create a subscription using the customer object and the trial_end parameter set to the time you want Stripe to start automatically billing the customer.
See https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/trials for more information about using trial periods.
This is possible now through Stripe Subscription Schedules. With that, you can create a one phase schedule that starts in the future. By default, this will start the subscription on the date you want, automatically renew, and charge the customer on the start date. Also by default, it will immediately perform a transaction to pay for the subscription.
I found the required iterations to be a bit confusing. Essentially that is a multiplier against how many times the original price's interval repeats before moving on.
If all you want to do is start a subscription price in the future, use the Subscription Schedule API call. Create an items array of 1. Set the price_id of the price, the iterations on that item, and the start_date to the unix timestamp you want to start the subscription.
Stripe has different use cases for subscription schedules. The first one they list is exactly this purpose, starting and charging a subscription on a future date. Look through them if you want to adjust some more, like making the first phase a trial period instead.