How to create subscriptions and make the user pay

⚙️ API
1

Hi,

I really do not understand how subscriptions work. In the docs at Subscriptions it is not explained how the user should pay. The docs are only a list of API. I should have a link to redirect the user to for the payment, of course.

I have never seen a so bad and confusing process. Anyone can help? I need to understand how to make the customer pay the subscription and complete the subscription process.

Thank you!

2

Thanks for sharing @schiocco. This is a great place to let us know what we can do to improve our documentation.

For clarity on your question are you asking the payment methods that the user would pay with or the exact UI of how the user would pay? Also what are you building your subscription product in?

Our subscriptions product is only available via API, which you can refer to on the reference guide. You will have to integrate with the API, as this will NOT use something like the Hosted Checkout Page. Currently the payment is only passed via API.

  • When you create the customer, the payment method will be stored in the Payment method ID or ‘payment_method’ object to pass through as the payment.

I also wrote a blog, What’s in a Subscriptions API that may help you.

As the documentation lays out here are the steps you would need to take. If you know what country you are doing business in and payment methods you offer you’l need to:

  1. Get all the required fields for each payment method.
  2. Use the Create Product request to create the product you will offer.
  3. Use the Create Plan request to set up the subscription offering.
  4. Use the Create Customer request and grab their Customer ID and Payment Method ID.
  5. Use the Create Subscription request to set up the actual subscription with the specific customer.

Hope to hear from you!

4

Hi,

What I need is to make the user pay. Also in your reply, you do not explain this…
How the user can pay? After wasting hours of time I see that after the invoice is generated I need to call the API method pay_invoice and it returns payments instructions.

Still, it is completely unusable because I must:

  1. Check all the 900+ payments methods of all countries because my service is for resellers, worldwide

  2. Create the form and UI of all 900+ payment methods.

  3. Check the required fields of all 900+ payment methods and display them via HTML/CSS.

  4. Get the user card information. This is a big security issue, and it is illegal in EU if you do not have passed government and banks security checks.

  5. Manage the payment process of 900+ payment methods. Ex. for WeChat in China I need to redirect to a QR Code generated by Rapyd.

All these features are already managed by your hosted checkout which works great, but it doesn’t support subscriptions.

The solution is to include the subscription feature in the hosted checkout. Can you let me know if you’re planning this?

Again, currently, it is almost impossible to use the subscriptions feature.

Thank you!

5

Thanks @schiocco. I needed clarity on what you are asking. I went back and bolded my clarifying questions as well as some supportive information.

The customer will pay on a custom UI built by the client, with PCI Certification. This is not ideal for SMB clients, but the more feature requests there are to integrate this with the Hosted Checkout Page, the better the chances this may be prioritized on the roadmap.

Typically clients may focus on a few countries and their payment methods to start, and then roll out other countries. This allows time to understand product market in each country rather than to have to immediately integrate with 900+ payment methods.

You are correct in why the Hosted Checkout Page works well to take care of all these hurdles.

You are also correct in saying that Rapyd cannot currently support your solution to include the subscription feature.

I have updated the documentation based on what I’ve learned from our conversation, and your experience.

Thanks again @schiocco.

6

Thank you! I appreciate your message. I understand my situation is different from common ones. Also, I do not need to actually implement all 900+ methods at once but I can develop each country when a user asks for it, still not usable for other reasons I mentioned.

I will keep using Rapyd with hosted checkout without subscription also if not ideal for my business. This means I will soon bring to Rapyd many new developers like me to open a Rapyd account (details at SaaS | Support Board). I will ask them to request subscription feature to move it up on the road map.

Regards

1 Like
7

Thanks @schiocco for your honesty and bringing this up. The more content there is about this the more attention it will get. I will absolutely bring this up, and pass this on!

8

Hi @schiocco, I hope you are well.

Just wanted to follow up here. We did release our Hosted Subscriptions Checkout page. Here are some docs below: