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Accept Recurring Payments Effortlessly With Chargebee

Setting up and accepting recurring payments don't have to give you a headache. Chargebee covers trial period management, multi-currency pricing plans, recurring billing & subscription management, security and everything in between.

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What are recurring payments and how do they work?

Recurring payments are payments that are automatically collected from your customers on a specific due date, at regular intervals of time, say, every month.

Accepting recurring payments involves two blocks:

Billing logic
Price calculation for purchases made, taking into account proration, grandfathering, etc and requesting a payment.
Payment processing
The actual transaction where your customer's card is charged and the amount is debited to your merchant account.
It is possible to accept recurring payments with only a payment processor, as long as you have a self-built billing engine on your end or make use of the basic billing engines provided by popular payment gateways.
It gets progressively harder to get paid as your products, services, customers and pricing scales. Free trials. Extensions. Evolving pricing tiers. Discounts. Credits. Upgrading customer plans. Taxes for multiple countries. Retrying failed payments. Every block you add means that someone (or something) has to do the work to tell the payment processors what payments to take and when.
Recurring billing systems working on top of payment gateways simplify getting paid when you scale your subscription business.

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recurring payments today

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Choosing the right
recurring billing solution

It depends on your needs. Will you need to:

Support one-time, recurring and/or usage-based charges within a single plan?
Extend trial periods for some of your customers?
Make sure access control and security are taken care of?
Archive or grandfather product pricing plans?
Send customized transactional emails?
Provide dashboards and out-of-the-box reports to different teams?
Have the flexibility to manually manage one-off anomalies in payments?
For a full list of considerations, check out our guide to evaluating enterprise-ready recurring billing and subscription management solutions →

The essentials of setting up
recurring payments

So, what should be on your radar as you assess these essentials? While accepting payments is a business necessity, remember that it's also an opportunity to provide a good payment experience to your customers and build trust.

1. Pick a payment gateway for your location:

Payment service providers differ in more ways than just the billing logic they support. They take different times to transfer funds between your customer's account and yours. Some of them let your customers complete the checkout on your own website, others redirect them to their own platform. They may need a merchant account or not. And they each support a range of currencies, payment types and shopping cart integrations.

Use Chargebee's free payment gateway tool to find and compare payment gateways in your country.

2. Choose a recurring billing software equipped with these minimum capabilities:
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    Invoices

    Clear, well-designed invoices build trust. Automatically send accurate invoices to customers without missing any crucial details.

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    Accounting Integration

    A recurring billing system should talk to your books. Robust integrations with accounting software will ensure there's no reconciliation mess and easy global tax support.

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    Checkout

    Checkout pages are an important part of a smooth payment experience. A checkout page that can be set up and customized, will drastically reduce time to market.

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    Customer self-service portal

    Self-serve portals enable customers to pause a subscription, upgrade or update card details on their own through an easy-to-use interface.

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    Team dashboard

    Track the health of your business and allow teams to make data-driven decisions with actionable insights from metrics, trends, summaries and reports.

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    Transactional emails

    Hit the ground running with billing solutions that offer pre-built transactional emails to onboard your customers and keep them informed about billing life cycle changes.

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    PCI Compliance

    When dealing with sensitive customer data, your billing provider must have PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance and other data and network security measures in place.

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    Developer-friendly APIs

    Developers are the first to feel the pain of integrating your product with a new system. Make things easy on them with robust APIs and useful documentation.

Chargebee makes it simple for you to sign up and accept recurring payments for free in no time. As your customer base grows with time and you require more sophisticated options like custom reports or email segmentation with easy customization, you'll be covered with our more advanced features. We scale with you, at your own pace.

Simplify recurring billing for your business.
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How to set up recurring payments with Chargebee

  • Configure billing rules and payment methods in the sandbox, our test site that lets you play around with no dire consequences.
  • Make sure you have your SSL certificate, merchant account and payment gateway ready.
  • Choose your preferred mode of integration with Chargebee: hosted pages, hosted pages + API or a complete API integration.
  • Set up taxes, review dunning and retry-payment settings.
  • Customize what's needed, like invoices. You're still in the sandbox, so you can play around with sample data.
  • Set up email templates and notifications so your customers get clear transactional communication from the get-go.
  • Go live. Flick a switch to convert your test site into a live site.
    • In addition to the above, you also have the option to configure webhooks, provide access control for team members and a whole lot more. If you need assistance, reach out to our quick-response customer support team who can guide you through the setup in a jiffy.
    Set up recurring payments