Stripe "Smarter Saved Cards" feature to auto update customer's card

[ScottN]

Stripe has an awesome feature that will automatically update a customer's card, if the bank replaces the card (new number, or just new expiration date).  However, there is no notification from Stripe to WHMCS that this has occurred.  So, we show an expired card in WHMCS, but Stripe is perfectly happy and would allow you to charge the customer's card just fine (but WHMCS won't even try).  

I can't seem to find any talk about this feature, and I'm not sure why... it would be reduce customer churn and improve customer service.

This feature from Stripe has been around for 4 years+.  Here is an article about their "Smarter Saved Cards" feature from 2015:

https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards

It says "The customer.source.updated webhook will fire if your customers’ info changes." --  could WHMCS listen for this and do something to update itself about the new card?

Thoughts?

- Scott

[brian!]

12 hours ago, ScottN said:

Thoughts?

my initial thought is that it was a pity you didn't post this in the v7.7 beta forums last month as it might have had a remote chance of being acted upon quickly if it only required a minor tweak to the Stripe module... but v7.7 beta development has supposedly closed to new features now, so that avenue is not really an option now.

effectively, I think you're looking at creating a feature request (yeah I know!) and waiting for WHMCS to act on it... if you create it, perhaps post the link in this thread (the requests can be notoriously difficult to find and that's one of the reasons they hardly get voted for - or you end up seeing multiple similar requests with a couple of votes each).

[ScottN]

Feature Request has been added and approved by WHMCS:

https://requests.whmcs.com/topic/add-support-for-stripe-smarter-saved-cards-to-automatically-update-cc-number-andor-exp-date

I think we just need WHMCS to create a script in /modules/gateways/callback/ to listen for Stripe to tell us about a card update (and point Stripe to that 'webhook' location)... then take that info (which includes the last 4 of the card, the month and year) and update the info we store in WHMCS.  

- Scott

[steven99]

You could dev your own callback file to take those actions.  For example (not tested):

// Retrieve the request's body and parse it as JSON:
$input = @file_get_contents('php://input');
$event = json_decode($input);
 
if (isset($event->type) and $event->type == "customer.source.updated" )
{
    // fetch customer from whmcs either by getting customer from stripe and get email and then search or grab from database 
    $results = localAPI("UpdateClient", [clientid=>1, 'expdate'=>$event->data->object->exp_month.$event->data->object->exp_year] );
}
//return http code to stripe to give it success or failure
http_response_code(200); // PHP 5.4 or greater

EDIT: You will also want to verify the event with stripe before taking action. 

Edited February 5, 2019 by steven99

[TheHostingHeroes]

I see this is in WHMCS v8 🙂