Recurring Billing Overview

What is Recurring Billing?

Recurring Billing is a value-added service that allows you to accept recurring payments, either for subscriptions or payment plans. Create Recurring Billing plans within your Merchant Services account, deciding the frequency, the amount, and the billing date for the plan. Your customers sign up with you directly for a subscription or a payment plan, and the you use a token to assign the customer to the appropriate Recurring Billing plan(s.) You can then automatically process recurring payments from your end users without storing any sensitive customer or payment information.

Because Recurring Billing uses secure tokens, it protects sensitive cardholder information and can prevent the theft of payment card information from the your system.

NOTE:
Recurring Billing can collect scheduled payments from customers. It cannot disburse payments.

Why use Recurring Billing?

You can use this service to accept automatic payments from your customers. Many types of merchants use this service; here are common reasons:

• Collect regular, recurring fees (for example, gym memberships)
• Allow customers to make recurring, equal payments over a defined period of time (for example, a payment plan) 
• Offer subscription services (monthly dog food delivery, book of the month club, etc.)

What is the difference between a Recurring Billing Plan and a Subscription?

Setting up Recurring Billing will require two things:

• Recurring Billing Plan
  Recurring Billing plans are plans that you set up that have attributes (ie., billing amount and billing frequency) that you want to use over and over again. Example: You could set up a “gold” plan that charges your customer $100 a month ongoing, with no end date. And you could set up another plan, a “silver” plan, that charges your customer $50 a month for a total of 6 months.
• Subscriptions 
  Subscriptions can only be created from an existing customer token. A customer token creates a tokenized profile for a merchant’s customer, and securely stores the information. Each customer token creates a billing token. A customer token is necessary to bill a customer via Recurring Billing. 
  Example: If you have a Gold Plan, you can create a subscription for your customer “John Doe” by assigning John Doe’s customer token to the Gold Plan.

NOTE:
To create a subscription, a customer token must be associated to a Recurring Billing plan.