I am trying to create a basic subscription service on my site and I am not sure of a standard way to deal with subscriptions. I'm sure I could hack something together but I'm just wondering if there is a suggested way.
So I have created a billing plan and activated it.
I have a subscribe button on my site that creates a billing agreement referring to the billing plan created in step 1 and redirects the user to the PayPal website were they can login and accept the subscription.
Once the user completes the actions on the PayPal website they are returned back to my site with a token were I then execute the agreement using the returned token from PayPal as per the documentation.
So I guess after these steps the subscription is created for that user, is active and the first payment is made immediately.
In my database, I have a field for each user names subscribed and it's value is a boolean which I set to true once they are returned to my site and the execute command is successful.
My problem is keeping this boolean value up to date for each user as this is the value I check to see if they can access the content.
Canceling - I can provide a cancel button on my site to cancel their subscription and when successful I can set the value to false. But what if they cancel through the PayPal website? I think there is a webhook names BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.CANCELLED which may send me the agreement ID and If I save it in my database I can see which user it belongs to and set their subscription to false.
After the first month has passed and the next payment is due, is there a webhook sent for a successful payment or a failed payment so I can then set the subscription value accordingly? I see there is a webhook named PAYMENT.SALE.COMPLETED but I don't know if this fired for a successful payment and PAYMENT.SALE.DENIED for a failed payment. If these webhooks exist for subscriptions I imagine it should be a simple solution to keeping this subscribed value up to date.
Hope this made some sense.
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".
Background:
When creating subscriptions through the Stripe API, you can use payment_behavior: error_if_incomplete when you want Stripe to return an HTTP 402 status code in case a subscription’s first invoice cannot be paid. In this case Stripe does not create a subscription at all if the payment fails.
Question:
Is there a way to achieve the same behavior when using Stripe Checkout?
My experience is that even if the payment fails, Stripe creates a subscription with status: incomplete which is then expired if no successful payment is made within 23 hours. I've checked the parameters for creating Checkout Sessions but found no option to set payment_behavior there.
Sources:
https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/create#create_subscription-payment_behavior
https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/create
Bad News
Unfortunately this is not something that can be configured presently. When Checkout creates a subscription, all the parameters not provided directly are set to the Subscription default. The default payment_behavior for a Subscription is default_incomplete.
Good News
You can achieve this behavior using Webhooks. You would listen for the invoice.payment_failed event, check the billing_reason property of the invoice is subscription_create (identifies the first invoice of a new subscription), and then cancel the related subscription.
If you are using Subscriptions and Invoices, it is recommended you use webhooks anyway to keep track of changes in status.
I have a code that disables the user to access my website upon receiving this event : customer.subscription.deleted . However, I want to set a specific condition before applying this code.
I have two cases, in one case, if the user is subscribed to INFINITE plan, he pays 40$ each month for 5 months (cancel_at field of subscription is set after 5 months)and then when the subscription ends, his access to the website remains valid. so after 5 payments, he no longer pays, but he still have access to the website. whereas in a second case, if the website's admin manually cancels the subscription or if it is cancelled after many failed payments, I want to disable the user's access. so is there any condition I can set to differentiate between a subscription that was cancelled after being fully paid and another one that was cancelled before it is fully paid ?
You would have to keep track of this on your end, or using metadata on the Subscription that you kept up to date. There's no way in Stripe to make this distinction.
Consider the following course of events:
A user selects one of multiple subscription options on my website and clicks the "pay" button.
They're redirected to the Stripe Checkout page but don't complete the payment yet.
They somehow manage to get back to the page where they select the subscription while keeping the Stripe Checkout page open. (I know this is somewhat contrived but technically possible.)
They choose a different subscription option and click on "pay" again.
A second checkout session is created and another Stripe Checkout page opens.
Now they complete payments on both checkout pages.
How can I prevent this? Is there a way to cancel a checkout session? When I create a checkout session for a subscription, I don't receive a payment intent that I could cancel. There also doesn't seem to be a way to cancel checkout sessions directly.
I don't know of a way to prevent the scenario you described as the customer in question is explicitly deciding to pay you twice for two different subscriptions.
That said, if your use case requires a customer to have only a single Subscription you could add logic on your end that would do the following:
Set up a webhook endpoint to listen for customer.subscription.created events.
Whenever a new Subscription is created list the Subscriptions belonging to the Customer.
If the Customer has more than one active Subscription cancel the newest one(s) and refund the associated payments. You may also want to send the customer an email letting them know what happened.
I'm implementing subscription with Stripe Checkout, but I have some questions that I couldn't get definitive answers for even from their support.
I have following scenario:
User clicks on a Subscribe button
User gets redirected to Stripe Checkout page (along with session token)
User successfully pays (and from now on is a Customer)
and here I get 14 webhook calls (each one is different event type):
checkout.session.completed
payment_method.attached
invoice.created
customer.updated
customer.subscription.created
customer.created (even though I used the same email - test mode, but still...)
invoice.finalized
invoice.updated
invoice.payment_succeeded
customer.subscription.updated
charge.succeeded
payment_intent.succeeded
payment_intent.created
invoice.updated
edit: I get all of them at once because I use Stripe CLI's listen feature and it probably shows all calls which normally wouldn't happen because they have to be defined in dashboard event by event. For instance if I create invoice in the dashboard and pay it then if no webhook is defined explicitly then my server won't know about anything
Until here it all works good. My concern is that:
if a Customer will be charged next month which webhook should I listen to? I need to differentiate between first-time Customer (because I create new account for that user) and existing Customer that I just need to note in database that this user is still active (or listen for event of subscription cancellation? subscription_schedule.canceled maybe?). One idea is to just listen to successful payment and upon that check if customer exists in database - if he does just update, if not then create account.
when I do another subscription payment using the very same email I get exactly the same webhooks (including customer.created which I think shouldn't be there) or am I missing something?
is there any possibility to double-charge a Customer by accident like I read in other Stripe implementations (see: idempotency)?
what are other things to take into account while implementing Stripe Checkout? I feel like their instructions are not reassuring that I've done everything that is considered good practice.
Flow that I want to achieve:
User successful payment (as above in points from 1 - 3). Already done!
Register new customer in database (Firebase in this case) and log him in automatically so after payment he has instant access.
As long as customer's card is charged he has access. While he cancels or card has no insufficient funds I need to have my server notified about this to downgrade access.