Overview
Nuvei’s new rebilling service enables merchants to create and manage recurring charges for products and services offered to their customers.
The service gives the merchant the flexibility to set payment plans or subscriptions. Moreover, it gives the merchant the ability to modify, extend, or cancel such charging plans.
The service also takes advantage of the card schemes’ “card updaters” (for supported cards) to ensure frictionless charging of a running subscription in the event of card details being changed by the card issuer on the customer’s side.
The service is available through our API, Cashier and Control Panel platforms.
All the above platforms communicate directly with the service’s API methods.
Sample workflow
To familiarize yourself with this workflow, you can also study the Recurring – with 3D-Secure scenario in the Nuvei postman collection. Import the JSON file in the link into Postman and follow additional instructions in Testing APIs with Postman.
Service Structure
The rebilling service consists of three key components:
- Plan – The recurring-payment conditioning offered by a merchant for a single or a set of products it sells.
- Subscription – The actual recurring payment contract that was set up for a specific customer.
- Customer – The end-user registered to one or more subscriptions, under one or more payment plans.
How It Works
Creating a subscription requires a merchant to provide an active payment option to be used in the subscription’s lifecycle. The user payment option (UPO) can be created by using a unique method on our end, which requires the card’s full payment details, including CVV2. When implementing Rebilling with Cashier, the Cashier can create the UPO as part of creating the subscription.
Once the initial payment’s date has arrived, an initial payment is sent for processing on the gateway using this payment method indicator.
Any recurring payment according to the subscription’s conditions is processed with the card’s token/UPOID, flagged to the acquirers as a rebilling payment and with no CVV2.
Subscription Management
The Rebilling plans that act as the base template for every subscription, can be created, edited, or deleted from our CPanel or via REST API methods.
The individual subscriptions can be created by either redirecting the customer to the Nuvei Checkout Page, where the customer is presented with the details of the subscription plan and can enter their card details or choose a previously saved card, or via the REST API method, which creates the subscription, using previously stored card details. Any or all parameters of the Rebilling plan, which is used as template for the subscription, can be changed dynamically during its creation.
The resulting subscriptions can be modified or cancelled via our CPanel or via REST API methods.
What if a Recurring Payment Fails
To ensure a smooth subscription experience to both its merchants and their customers, Nuvei has implemented a retry engine into its rebilling service. If a recurring payment is declined, the merchant is notified with a DMN (Direct Merchant Notification) callback, and our retry mechanism is initiated:
- The first retry is executed 72 hours after the initial decline. If this attempt fails, the merchant is once again notified about a declined payment.
- A second retry is executed 72 hours after the second decline. If the retry also fails, the merchant is notified with a notification about a declined payment.
- The third and final is executed 72 hours after the payment has failed again (72×3=216 hours after the initial decline). If the third retry fails, the subscription is cancelled, and the merchant is notified accordingly with a notification indicating a subscription cancellation. Nuvei notifies the merchant by sending a subscription DMN type with the subscription status changed to “Inactive”. On each re-try transaction, Nuvei notifies the merchant by sending a subscriptionPayment DMN type with transaction status = Declined.
Recurring Payments (Managed by the Merchant)
In addition to the rebilling service described above, where the Nuvei system is responsible for storing and managing the membership details, and also schedules the recurring charges, merchants may opt to use our REST API – more specifically the /payment method to maintain the rebilling memberships on their end, and initiate the recurring charges instead of relying on our system to do it.
When initiating recurring charges, the merchant must flag them with the parameter isRebilling (0 – initial transaction from a recurring cycle, 1 – subsequent transactions from recurring cycle).
The transactions can be performed using userPaymentOptionId or cardData. If it is done using cardData, then it is highly recommended to send its relatedTransactionId as well.