Stripe is a subscription billing and revenue management platform built for businesses offering recurring, SaaS-based, or usage-based pricing models.Vida integrates with Stripe to enable your Agent product plans to work seamlessly with Stripe’s subscription system. This allows you to create and manage monthly subscriptions based on your Vida plans.
Before starting your Stripe configuration, make sure you obtain the following information from the Vida team prior:
Your Reseller Id (Used for configuring the webhook URL)
While this document covers setting up your Stripe environment, at this end of this configuration, you will be providing the Vida team with the following information:
Through your Vida reseller portal, customers can subscribe to your agent product plans and be redirect to Stripe’s hosted checkout session (secure checkout). This will collect the customer’s payment information and create a new subscription under the Stripe customer profile.If the payment succeeds, Stripe will inform the Vida platform the account is paid and apply the requested plan.Note: If the customer account in Stripe already has other active subscriptions for your other products, Vida creates a new subscription as to not interfere with your policies on that subscription.
Stripe manages the subscripton renewals itself. By default, Vida subscriptions renew on the anniversary day of when the subscription was created. If a subscription was created on April 5th, then the subscription will renew on May 5th. When the subscription renews, Stripe informs the Vida platform a new billing cycle has begun which allows Vida to provide current and previous billing period ranges on our usage screens.
When a customer wants to upgrade or downgrade their Agent plan, Vida automatically switches the plan in the existing subscription. On upgrades, Stripe will charge the prorated amount of the new plan immediately to bring the balance where it should be. On downgrades, Stripe may be configured to credit customer account the amount instead of refunding. This would be applied on the next billing cycle.
As a customer’s usage progresses through the month, when the next billing cycle happens, we will grab the usage from the previous billing period (previous month) and determine if any usage overages are due. Overages are any product items you have configured for their plan and they have consumed an amount that exceeds any included amount. These charges are then pushed to Stripe’s pending invoice so payment can be collected.
After you have already worked with the Vida team to create your agent product plans (agent plan creation and management coming soon to the reseller portal!), we will need to create the product plans and pricing in Stripe. We’ll then need to take the product plan Id and price Id and configure it on your agent product plan in the Vida platform.
In your Stripe account:
Navigate to **Product Catalog **and click “+Create product ” button
In the Add a product screen:
Name: This should match the plan name you provided in your Vida Agent plan
Description: This is a friendly description that your customers will see on the checkout screen
Click “Recurring” box right above amount
Set the Amount to the plan’s dollar amount that matches the amount you have set on the Vida agent plan
Billing Period: Set to “Monthly”
Click “Add Product” button to create the product plan
Note: Vida does not provide any tax advice on how to charge taxation to your products.
After you click create, we will need to collect both the product Id and the price Id
3. This will bring you to the Product Catalog screen. Grab the product Id and the Price Id for the plan. Click on the product you just created.
The product Id is on the right under Details. Click the copy button to get the product Id associated with this plan.
The price Id can be obtained by clicking the ”…” next to the price in the Pricing section and click “Copy price id”
Repeat these steps for any other agent products you created with Vida. Provide both the Product Id and the Price id to the Vida team to complete the agent product plan configuration.
Vida uses Stripe’s hosted checkout when customers choose an initial plan in the Agent platform. Hosted Checkout is enabled by default. But you may want to customize the Checkout screen to give your branding (logo, etc).
Go to the Gear Icon on the top right to access settings, then Business -> BrandingTab-> Checkout & Payment Links tab. Vida uses embedded by default but it’s good practice to udpate both Stripe Hosted and Embedded.
Enabling Customer Portal (Payment Method Management and Invoices)
Vida uses Stripe’s customer portal feature to allow user’s to securely manage their payment methods and view invoices. This is not enabled by default.
To enable the Customer Portal feature, navigate to Settings (Gear Icon) -> Billing -> Customer portal tab.
Under Invoices, toggle Invoice history to enabled
Under Customer information, enable Customer infromation and allow the attributes you want them to be able to change.
Under Payment methods, enable Payment methods
Under Cancellations, it’s recommended to toggle this to disabled and allow them to only cancel through your Vida reseller portal.
Under Subscriptions, it’s recommended to disable these settings if possible to avoid allowing them to switch plans/quantity to a product not configured on Vida.
Under Business Information, these items are optional. Vida’s platform will handle all the Redirect link when it creates portal sessions.
Lastly, let’s configure the communication link between Stripe and Vida. This will allow Vida to receive the events from Stripe when payments or subscription events occur.
Click on the **Developers **button on the bottom left of the portal.
Click on the Webhooks tab then click + Add endpoint button
Click the + Select events button. Vida requires the following events:checkout.session.completedcharge.succeededcharge.failedcustomer.updatedcustomer.subscription.deletedcustomer.subscription.updatedcustomer.subscription.createdinvoice.payment_failedinvoice.overdueinvoice.paidinvoice.marked_uncollectibleinvoice.created (12 events total)
Click Add endpoint button to finish the configuration
After the endpoint is added, obtain the webhook signing key by clicking on the new endpoint you just created and clicking Reveal under the Signing secret in the top section. Provide this as the webhook signing key to Vida.
Stripe will handle collection of payment after an attempted payment of an invoice failes. You can configure how long an account remains in a past due state and how often Stripe tries to re-attempt the payment.
Here is where you also configure what Stripe does with the subscription when it has exhaused all retries. For instance, if all payment retries have failed, you may want Stripe to automatically cancel the subscription. This would trigger the Vida platform to put the account in an unpaid state and release all of the phone numbers from the agents. Vida recommends this if you do not want to manage the collection itself and wish your customer’s agents to be shutdown if payment can not be collected. Below is Vida’s recommendation but please use the settings best for your business practice.
To configure the Failed Payment settings, go to Settings (Gear Icon) -> Billing -> Subscription and emails tab.
Prevent failed Payments
Enable Send emails about expiring cards with Link to a Stripe-hosted page
Manage failed payments for subscriptions
Select Use a Smart Retry Policy for subscriptions and Retry up to 8 times within 2 weeks
Enable Send emails when card payment fail with Link to a Stripe-hosted page
Set If all retries for a payment fail to cancel the subscription
Set If all retries for a payment fail to mark the invoice as uncollectible
Manage invoices sent to customers
Enable Send finalized invioces and credit notes to customers
Ensure to hit Save for each section where you have made changes.