Introduction to Recurring Billing

The Recurring Billing service enables you to 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:
  • Token
    : stores customer billing, shipping, and payment details.
  • Plan
    : stores the billing schedule.
  • Subscription
    : combines the token and plan and defines the subscription start date, name, and description.
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.

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.

Account Validation (Pre-Authorization)

When you capture payment card data for future use,
Cybersource
recommends that you validate the payment card account. Account validation ensures that the account number entered is an active, valid account. You can also use the Address Verification Service (AVS), the Card Verification Number (CVN), and expiration date validation. To validate the account, initiate a zero amount authorization transaction.
To verify that your processor supports zero amount authorizations, see the zero amount authorizations information in the
Credit Card Services Optional Features Supplement
.

Supported Processors

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

REST API

Register and obtain authentication credentials for the REST API.
See the
Cybersource
Hello world sandbox in the Developer Center.