To support recurring billing some connections (mainly card processors) require transactions to be marked accordingly to properly indicate if a transaction is part of a recurring sequence of transactions. It is important to set these indicators correctly to ensure a successful authorization for subsequent transactions.

Recurring transactions can generally be categorized as scheduled payments, unscheduled payments, subscriptions, or installments.

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Recurring payment flags

To facilitate recurring payments we support three properties that can be set when creating a new card transaction.

  • payment_source - The source of the transaction. This defaults to ecommerce and can be set to recurring, installment, or card_on_file.
  • merchant_initiated - Indicates whether the transaction was initiated by the merchant (true) or if the customer was present (false).
  • is_subsequent_payment - Indicates whether the transaction represents a subsequent payment. Please note this flag is only compatible when the payment_source is set to recurring, installment, or card_on_file and will be ignored for other values or if payment_source is not present.

We will automatically map these 3 properties to your downstream payment service’s properties, where they apply. Currently, these mostly only apply to card processors.

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Best practices

Please follow the following best practices when creating recurring payments.

  • When created a customer-initiated transaction (CIT), with merchant_initiated=false, providing the security_code (CVV) is highly recommended. Not doing so could result in declined transactions.
  • Before creating a merchant-initiated transaction (MIT), with merchant_initiated=true, it’s highly recommended to make an initial CIT first so the customer gives their authorization. Any subsequent transaction will then be identified as being authorized by this first transaction.
  • When doing an MIT transaction, it’s recommended to provide the previous_scheme_transaction_id where possible. This should represent a previous CIT to relate to. If you use a stored payment method we will attempt to use the right ID from a previous transaction with the same payment method.