Introduction to Recurring Billing

This guide explains how to integrate to the Recurring Billing REST API.
The Recurring Billing service enables you to create and manage payment plans and subscriptions for recurring payment schedules. It automates the storage and handling of your customer’s payment information and personal data within secure Visa data centers in compliance with credentials-on-file (COF) best practices. Storage risks and the PCI DSS scope are reduced through the use of
the
Token Management Service
 (
TMS
)
.
Cybersource
 Recurring Billing consists of these three elements:
  • Plan:
     Stores the billing schedule.
  • Subscription:
     Combines the token and plan and defines the subscription start date, name, and description.
  • Token:
     Stores customer billing, shipping, and payment details.
For information about Recurring Billing in the
Business Center
, see the
Recurring Billing User Guide
.
Recurring payments can also be handled with the payments API. Merchant-initiated transactions (MITs) are part of the payments API. For more information on recurring payments using MITs, see the Recurring Payments section in the
Payments Developer Guide
.
IMPORTANT
Do not use this document if you are using the payments API to process recurring payments. When using payments API for MITs, you must capture and store the customer's payment credentials manually. Also, you send the payments API MIT requests to different endpoints than you send the recurring billing requests.
The Recurring Billing service is available for the
REST
 API only. The service is not available in the
SCMP
 API or the
Simple Order
 API.

Supported Processors

IMPORTANT
These Latin American processors are not yet supported for Recurring Billing services:
  • Comercio Latino
  • Prosa

Prerequisites

Your account must be enabled for Recurring Billing and configured for
the
Token Management Service
 (
TMS
)
. The customer token is the only token type that can be used with Recurring Billing.

Getting Started with the REST API

If you have not already, you must register and obtain authentication credentials for the REST API.
Go to the
Cybersource
 Hello world sandbox in the Developer Center.