This is a useful feature.  I'd like to give an example of how we'd use it in particular.  We typically use trial subscriptions where no credit card is required.  During the trial, we encourage the user to enter a credit card before the trial expires rather than wait for the trial to end and start dunning.  Once the user has entered a card, we stop asking.  Once we have a card on file, we remind them that their card will be charged at the end of the trial period.  We don't start charging immediately, because it is still a free trial (fully featured trial...  and so no reason for the customer to end the trial early).

We create the subscription via the API and use the hosted pages for updating the payment method.  Right now we poll periodically once we get a hint that the user has updated the card information.  We only know if they click to update their card from our link.  However, it is conceivable that the user obtains the link and does not update the card.  We wait for a bit before giving up on polling. If the user then goes back to chargify to update their card via a saved link (direct chargify link), we'll have no hint that they've gone their.  So we can end up in a situation where the card is updated but we are still asking the customer to provide a card.

So our only real solution is to poll chargify for card information for all subscriptions that are trialing.  Obviously, this is not the best thing for us or Chargify.

Thanks.

Hi Robert, we have the exact same pattern.  We all give a full featured trial, and if they haven't started paying, we drop them into a free plan.  While I would think this would be a common use case, Chargify has told us not many of their clients do this.

Thank you, Lance.  In the mean time (@Nader), I gather from the documentation:

"The Return URL after successful account update is the URL that the user will be redirected to after they update their payment details using the “self-service” hosted card update page. The Return parameters specify the data that will be passed back in the query string of both Return URLs (i.e. it is shared between both URLs)."

At least in the case of self-edited credit cards, we can use the callback url to give us the hint that the card has changed. I don't know if that helps you as well, but I'm going to make use of it.

Please bump this, for whatever reason if the redirect is stopped or fails, then we have no idea the update occured!

Hi Lance,

Any pressure with subscriptions paying by ACH/eCheck -- at least for gateways that support this?

If not, how might I add such pressure. ;-)

- Bob

I don't see much in the "Invoice" thread.  I think invoices are a fantastic idea... but certainly more involved than ACH.  Is there somewhere I'm missing a discussion on invoicing features/requirements.  We currently do this outside chargify and still use chargify for dunning (in a round about way).  If we/Closerware can add to the discussion, we'd love to!

Thanks,

Bob