Subscription overview

Explore Solidgate subscriptions for seamless recurring customer payments

Solidgate subscription feature connects customers to your product, defines recurring payment frequency, and outlines what they have signed up for.

Solidgate subscription logs are stored for 30 days.

In the initial stages of working with the Solidgate subscription system, merchants must manually create a product and its associated price following the subscription rules in the Solidgate HUB . This process is detailed in the Guide
Explore how to establish subscription products, handle customer data, process payments, and utilize the smart retry feature. product and price management section. After creating the product, it gets a unique product_id . The unique identifier should be passed to initialize the subscription payment via one of the Solidgate’s Guide
Solidgate Payment Page, Payment Link, and Payment Form offer flexibility to cater to different integration needs for seamless checkout experiences. checkout solutions , Card API , and APM API payments.

Please note that among the APMs, only , , and currently support subscription payments.

Subscription process

To initiate a subscription for a customer, merchants follow a streamlined process that involves product creation, payment processing, and subscription initialization.

The merchant creates a product and receives a product_id .
The merchant passes the product_id in the request. To create a subscription, include customer_account_id , a required parameter for subscription initialization.
- via one of the Guide
  Solidgate Payment Page, Payment Link, and Payment Form offer flexibility to cater to different integration needs for seamless checkout experiences. checkout solutions
- via Card API or APM API
Solidgate obtains the price and payment configurations from the product configuration and sends the payment for processing.
After successful payment processing and subscription creation, the merchant receives the subscription_id and a notification regarding the subscription creation, which can be also viewed in the Guide
Effortlessly receive automatic notifications by subscribing to updates. events section.

The merchant can use the subscription_id to perform further operations on the subscription, such as changing the product, cancelling, or resuming the subscription. The subscription_id also serves as a key to locating the specific subscription in the HUB.

Our system restricts the creation of multiple active subscriptions for the same customer_account_id and product_id within a channel. To prevent double charging, Solidgate disallows duplicate subscriptions by declining these attempts with a , ensuring a single subscription per product.

Subscription with free trial

Merchants may choose to offer customers a trial period for their products at no cost at all. To facilitate free trials, merchants can use the auth-void process and specify product_id associated with a trial product setting, applicable in Apple Pay API , Google Pay API , or Recurring API payment requests.

In such cases, Solidgate’s subscription service processes a trial payment by executing two transactions of the auth-void process:

Authorization of $1: This is a temporary hold to verify the payment method.
Automatic voiding: Once authorized, this $1 payment is immediately voided, and the amount is returned to the customer.

As a result of this process:

The order: amount value is replaced with 1.
The order: currency value is set to USD.
Merchants receive confirmation about both the authorization and void transactions.
If a void transaction is not successful, Solidgate automatically retries it.
The final Guide
An order is a request to purchase goods or services. It is created by a customer as a record of what they want to buy. Orders can remain in the created state until a payment is attempted. Once a payment is attempted, the order moves to the processing state, where it stays until the payment is captured. Orders can also go through various other states, such as 3ds_verify , approved , declined , refunded , etc. order status is set to void_ok.

This approach ensures that merchants can offer trial periods effectively while maintaining the integrity of the payment process and providing a seamless experience for customers.

It is important for merchants to understand this process to manage customer expectations and ensure a smooth trial period experience.

Subscription statuses

Status	Description
active	Subscription remains active, and the customer is billed at the regular intervals.
paused	Billing for the subscription is halted during the specified pause period or until manual reactivation.
cancelled	Subscription is cancelled, and the user is unsubscribed.
redemption	If the subscription product contains retries, then if the recurring payment gets declined due to one of the error codes, the subscription goes into the redemption period. If all retry attempts are declined, the subscription status becomes cancelled . If any of the attempts on the retry are successful, the subscription status changes to active .

An active subscription means that the customer continues to pay for the product on a recurring basis. If the customer unsubscribes, the subscription status is cancelled . If the subscription product contains retries and a recurring payment is declined due to one of the error codes, the subscription goes into a redemption period. If all retry attempts are declined, the subscription status becomes cancelled . However, if any of the retry attempts is successful, the subscription status changes to active again. However, if a subscription is put on hold, it enters a paused status, during which the customer billing is suspended until the designated pause duration concludes or a manual reactivation is triggered.

After performing the subscription status request, you receive information about the last invoice for the subscription and the order status ID, which you can later use to verify the external order ID in the Solidgate HUB .

Subscription invoice limit

There is a specific limit on the number of invoices that can be in a processing state for a single subscription.

When customers sign up for a subscription with the same customer_account_id and product_id combination, they can simultaneously have up to 3 invoices in processing for the subscription’s first payment.

The invoice limit aims to improve the conversion rate of the first sale. Moreover, it provides flexibility for customers to make payments using multiple payment methods while keeping the number of pending orders manageable.

For efficient invoice management and Guide
Improve customer experience and prevent fraud chargebacks. chargeback prevention , if an invoice is stuck in processing and another has been successfully completed, the update about the successful payment triggers an immediate refund for the invoice in the processing state. Similarly, if there is a duplicate charge on a subscription, such as from delayed order processing, the second invoice is refunded, which positively impacts the chargeback rate.

API Reference

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