Choosing a payment method and the way your customers will be billed is an essential step in the setup process of a subscription platform. It has both financial, legal, and commercial implications.
With Cleeng, you can choose your preferred way of billing your customers from the following options:
- Cleeng's Merchant solution
- Your own Payment Service Provider (PSP)
- Integrating with other billing systems (e.g. carrier billing, mobile network operators, and other third-party providers)
Cleeng's Merchant solution
Through Core, you have access to Merchant, Cleeng’s payment and checkout solution. Merchant handles every stage of the payment process to put your mind at ease, e.g. user-friendly checkout, tax management, or dunning actions for effective recurring billing.
We recommend going with Cleeng being a merchant of record, as it will reduce the huge burden of you building a payment connector from scratch. With Cleeng being a merchant of record, you get to choose among the two market-leading payment providers Adyen and PayPal to process web transactions.
Your own Payment Services Provider (PSP)
Cleeng provides the right ecosystem to connect with many payment gateways, so if you have your preferred payment processing method, you can integrate it with Cleeng. This is possible through the Cleeng payment API, thanks to which you can connect with a payment gateway and perform such actions as:
- Payment initiating process for a new subscription,
- Recurring billing actions for an existing subscription,
- Setting and managing the dunning actions for the existing subscription,
- Canceling the existing subscription
- Updating the existing payment details
The Cleeng Payment API has been built to integrate with different payment gateways using the designated connectors. This gives you the flexibility to use your desired payment gateway and enjoy the benefits of Cleeng Subscriber Retention Management. However, this also requires more effort on your side, as it is your responsibility to build a connector. For more information, see our tutorial: Adding a Payment Connector.
Integrate with other billing systems
You can integrate with other billing systems, such as telcos, too. When you choose this option, you need to contact our Support Team team to configure a custom payment method.
Integrating with external billing systems (e.g. carrier billing, mobile network operators, and other third-party providers) is a bit similar to the previous case - integrating a payment gateway of your choice, as it utilizes Cleeng payment API. You only need to register the payments processed in the external system in the Cleeng platform.
An important thing is to decide on who will trigger the recurring billing - whether it will be Cleeng or an external system. And resulting from this decision comes the notification logic. Notifications must be implemented in such a way that both Cleeng and an external billing system are in sync so that entitlements are handled properly. We also need to register the transaction in our system so that it’s available in reporting.