CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stripe-payments
david_adler
david_adler

Reputation: 10922

Migrating stripe subscription to be SCA compliant

I have a subscription, I collect card details on signup with a 7 day trial, after which the subscription bills monthly.

From what I understand the subscription API is not SCA compliant. Instead

  1. An off_session payment Intent must first be setup when collecting card details.
  2. At the end of each month a scheduler must be triggered to attempt to charge the registered card.

Is this the case? Am I now responsible for scheduling payments?

Update

For those who want some starter code, I created a working playground here with subscriptions, frontend (react) and backend (express) on glitch.

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Upvotes: 2

Views: 1330

Answers (1)

karllekko
karllekko

Reputation: 7198

It's not true that Stripe's Subscription API is not SCA-ready, it is, and you don't have to set up your own scheduling like that. The docs you linked to are generally aimed at processing one-off payments(like saving a customer's details and then allowing them to use them again when they re-visit your site to purchase something new, for example) as opposed to recurring ones.

https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/payment describes how to set up a subscription in a way that is SCA-ready. While the customer is on-session on your payment page, you collect card details and create a subscription for the customer, which will generally attempt a payment for the first billing period. You then check the status of the subscription after it's created, and handle the outcomes:

  • the subscription is active and the payment was successful, so you can proceed with provisioning your service to the customer.
  • the subscription is incomplete — for SCA purposes, let's say this is because 3D Secure authentication was required for that first payment. In this case, the latest_invoice of the subscription exposes a PaymentIntent property, and you use that PaymentIntent in conjunction with your frontend code using stripe.js to walk the customer through authenticating the payment, and that activates the subscription.
  • the subscription is trialing — if the subscription doesn't involve an initial payment, like when using a trial period for example, you can also check if the subscription has a pending_setup_intent. You can use this on your frontend to have the customer complete a 3D Secure authentication, so that future payments(like the first one after the trial) are more likely to successfully claim an exemption and not require having the user authenticate at that point.

You can also instead use Stripe Checkout to easily collect payment details and set up a customer and subscription for you, while also handling any initial authentication that's needed : https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/server#create-subscriptions

As for the recurring payments, Billing can handle that for you. You can configure you settings to automatically email the customer to complete 3D Secure if it's encountered on a recurring payment. So you can absolutely build an SCA-ready solution with the subscriptions API on Stripe.

Upvotes: 5

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