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Automatic Re-Occuring Billing


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Perhaps I have been operating under the wrong philosphy the past few months since installing WHMCS so I am looking for some insight.

 

I thought that by my hosting company offering payment options like google checkout, paypal, 2checkout, etc. potential clients and existing clients will appreciate the piece of mind associated with using these type of payment vendors. However, I am disappointed to see that automated recurring billing does not occur and my churn percentage has risen since having to have clients manually make payments. What options do I have available in the WHMCS that will enable automated recurring payments? Do you agree with my peace of mind theory?

 

Your insight is appreciated in advance and will be greatly valued.

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About the only time we ever have to issue refunds are for paypal subsciption clients who've forgotten to cancel before the renewal date for sites they've abandonded.

 

4% of our clients have subscriptions, 0.3% have free service (internal projects, staff etc) the others all get an invoice and pay (or not) every period (80%+ of our invoicing is annual)

 

Attrition rate is virtual zero and from a "gateway" perspective, almost all the only "leavers" this year all paid by paypal, 70% subscription based.

 

So No, I dont think invoicing clients rather than "autopayment" makes any difference to churn rates - the real difference is in the auto-suspend, as it tends to "wake up" the non payers when it all goes off - everytime we run the cron job our merchant account gets a lot of use very quickly ...

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  • 1 month later...

So here's a question... I just started using WHMCS last month and entered my clients in and they paid their invoice online and put a credit card on file.

 

I expected this month (billing due on 9/1) that those account due monthly would have their card automatically charged... but alas I see that did NOT happen? Why?

 

The whole point of me coming over to WHMCS was that the automatic recurring credit card payments got handled for me every month with no intervention! Please let me know :-)

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I myself have used Protx and now paypal, and have had no problems with either. Obviously, that is with using the subscription setting for paypal.

 

Various gateways have different ways of setting this up.

 

If you can post what gateway you are using, it would help folks on here point you in the right direction.

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I use Paypal Website Payments Pro merchant gateway. Don't confuse that with regular Paypal, as Website Payments Pro works just like a regular full-fledged CC gateway so I assume that WHMCS can bill the monthly recurring payment automatically.

 

Let me clarify as well... WHMCS did try the payment because I see a "Credit Card Payment Failed" email went to the client. Also, the CC number is stored on file for the client, so it must have failed because for whatever reason WHMCS didn't store the CCID for the recurring payment, and thus when it tried to run it the CC payment, it failed.

 

In my old system, I had to manually run each client's card every month. So when I transitioned clients to WHMCS I put their card numbers in for them and ran their first month's payment through WHMCS (on August 1st). I assumed that on Sept 1st these payments would automatically get rebilled, but they didn't. Now, I originally entered their card info via the admin link (in the top right-hand corner it said "logged in as admin") so I technically wasn't logged in as the user... could that have affected it?

 

The client page shows that their CC info is stored from when I did it in August (because you can see it when you login as them) but maybe since I did it as the admin the CCID didn't store and that's why it said "Credit Card Payment Failed" on Sept 1st, instead of a success.

 

I just went through and logged in as each client and entered their card info again, to pay for this month, so do you think this time, since I logged in as the client, that the system will properly store the CCID and next month it will do this automatically?

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Hi Trappedatuf

 

WHMCS doesn't hold the CVV number required by Paypal Website Payments Pro... It's illegal to hold the CVV number in your DB longer than the duration of the current transaction.

 

If you checkout the gateway log you will probably see:

 

Field format error: 10748-This transaction cannot be processed without a Credit Card Verification number.

 

So the two system's will not talk to each other and your users must login and pay each order manually online, bit of a tall order for monthly invoicing!

 

I'm in pretty much the same boat as you here and looking for a solution, a UK friendly payment gateway which does not require the CVV code in the gateway transaction api call...

 

Any help appreciated!

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