Discontinued

Subscription payments are available to current subscription API users only.

Subscription Payments

Scenario

Subscription payments - where a payment is charged to a payer on a regular schedule (weekly, monthly, yearly, etc).

Example

You are a SaaS (software as a service) platform that wants to charge your customers a recurring monthly fee for the use of your software or service.

Key Concepts

WePay provides the following objects as part of it's subscription feature:

  • Subscription Plan: This object represents the template for individual subscriptions. An example would be "Gold Plan: $40.00/month". Anyone signing up for the "Gold" Subscription plan would be charged $40 per month and their subscription would be linked to this plan.
  • Subscription: This object represents the individual subscription that a payer would subscribe to. The subscription object tracks what payer is subscribed, their payment details, what subscription plan they are using.
  • Subscription Charge: This object represents an individual payment as part of a subscription. If someone signed up for the "Gold Plan: $40/month", then a subscription payment object would be created each month that represented the $40 charge to that payer.

There are two options for signing up payers for subscriptions:

  • Iframe - Iframe uses the /subscription/create API call to obtain a subscription_uri which can be used to sign up the payer for a subscription. This method lets you use WePay's pre-built and optimized form to collect credit card information. This method minimizes necessary PCI compliance, because information is shared securely between the browser and WePay.
  • Tokenization - Tokenization uses WePay's tokenization.js to obtain a credit card token which can submitted to the /subscription/create call. This method lets you use your own form to collect credit card information. As there is exposure to developer error or fraud, there is more PCI compliance required than there is with iframe.

Solutions