Payments

Overview

A Recharge Payment Method represents the customer's payment vehicle. Payment methods are important to how Recharge works with merchants and their customers. Merchants want to offer a simple and easy way for their customers to purchase products and set up subscriptions. Customers, on the other hand, want to have flexibility in how they pay for these products and subscriptions.

The Payment Method object holds payment and billing information. A customer may have many payment records, depending on how they've paid for their subscriptions. See Payment Methods in the Recharge API Reference Guide for more information.

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Platform

• Recharge Checkout on Shopify
• Shopify Checkout Integration
• Custom

Single Payment Method

With the Single Payment Method approach, a single payment method is used as the one payment method for a customer. Recharge's charge processing uses this payment method for all payments.

Use case

A customer decides they want to enroll in a meal delivery subscription service to have fresh, pre-cooked meals delivered to his home, saving the amount of time spent preparing and cooking meals. The customer sets up a subscription with the merchant and adds a single payment method (a personal credit card) that is linked to the customer’s home address. This one payment method is linked to the customer’s address and will be used for all future charges as long as the subscription is active.

Multiple Payment Methods

With the Multiple Payment Methods approach, you can provide your customers additional flexibility by allowing multiple addresses to be linked to the same payment method. With Multiple Payment Methods, you can store multiple payment vehicles for a single Customer. The Customer then chooses to associate one of the saved Payment Methods to each of their Addresses.

Your store is automatically configured to use Multiple Payment Methods if you use the Shopify Checkout Integration. SCI stores use the Shopify platform to process charges, and because of this, Shopify owns the definition of the different payment methods. You will still be able to read payment methods using the Recharge API, but are not able to manage these payment methods.

Use case

A customer enjoys the home meal delivery and purchases another subscription to have lunch delivered to their office. The customer would like to use two different payment methods for these subscriptions since they can use their work credit card to expense their lunches.

With Multiple Payments, the customer continues using the original payment method used when the home meal delivery was set up, but now needs to set up a new subscription for lunch delivery to a new address (their office address). Instead of only being able to use one payment method for both subscriptions, the customer now has the ability to use two different payment methods; one for their home meal delivery, and another for their office lunch delivery. So the customer adds their work credit card for their office lunches, which is linked to their office address.

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Note:

In this use case, there are two different payment methods used: a personal credit card, and a professional credit card, each linked to different addresses.

Payment Method Representations in the Recharge API

Since Multiple Payment Methods also encompasses the ability to model Single Payments, Multiple Payments Methods is the way to represent a customer’s different means of payment with Recharge starting from API version 2021-11 API version 2021-11. Single Payment Method (aka payment_sources) are still supported by 2021-01.

payment_sources

The API version 2021-01 grouped the modeling of Single Payments under the payment_sources endpoint. This resource is available for 2021-01 and is replaced by Payment Methods from 2021-11.

The figure below shows how a single payment method is represented for a customer.

Payment Methods

You must use API version 2021-11 to enable multiple payment methods.

The figure below illustrates how multiple payment methods can be associated with a customer.

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Important

A customer may be associated with many different payment methods, but an address record can be associated with only one payment method.

FAQs

Why are payment methods linked to an address and not a subscription?

Having a link to an address, instead of a subscription, allows for the aggregation of charges at the address level. If charges are due on the same day for the same address, but for different products, then all charges will be collapsed into one single charge.

How can I tell which payment method is used when processing a charge?

A payment method can be linked to one or more addresses, while an address can only have one default payment method. When processing a charge for a given subscription (or a set of subscriptions) Recharge will reference the address to get the associated default payment method. If no payment method is linked to the address, the customer will not be able to be charged for the transaction.

The store I'm working with uses both Stripe and Braintree; how do we keep track of which one to use?

Each payment method is defined with which payment processor to use (e.g. PayPal will always use Braintree) and we only rely on the information in the charge and the payment method when processing a charge. Any store or customer-level information about payment processors is ignored.

I tried using the payment_methods endpoint, but received the following error: “You do not have sufficient permissions (scopes) for this object.” What should I do?

You must migrate to the new RCPM system to obtain access to this new payment_methods endpoint.