Paytm Subscription

Subscription Payments are meant to charge a consumer on a prearranged, recurring schedule automatically after obtaining one-time consent from the consumer for the services/products they consume on an ongoing basis without any explicit payment action at their end. Paytm Subscriptions offers you a plethora of payment options and enough flexibility to support your complex business needs that saves time and gets you paid faster.

Note: Paytm Subscription is available only to the enterprise customers. Get in touch to request access to Paytm Subscription.

Paymodes supported for subscription payments

Currently, Paytm supports the following paymodes to collect the recurring payments:

PAYMENT OPTION	SUPPORTED BANKS	MAX LIMIT	LEVERAGE PAYTM's SAVED INSTRUMENTS*
Credit Card	Banks LIVE on Visa & Mastercard - HDFC, ICICI, SBI, Axis, Yes Bank, Citibank and other major banks.	Additional Factor of Authentication is required only for transactions above Rs. 15000 or the maximum mandate amount set by the cardholder	220+ Million Saved Cards
Debit Card			220+ Million Saved Cards
Paytm Balance	Paytm Wallet	₹ 15,000	400+ Million Wallets
UPI Autopay	Check list of banks and PSPs here	₹ 15,000	100+ Milion Saved Bank Accounts
eNACH	Check list of NPCI supported banks here	₹ 10,00,000	100+ Milion Saved Bank Accounts

*Numbers updated as per 1st May 2020

If you want to integrate for Paper Mandates, where the limit is up to 1 crore per transaction, Get in touch to get the necessary integration specifications.

Overview of Paytm Subscription

Subscription Payments includes three basic steps:

Create Subscription

You offer a customer to pay a recurring price at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, or yearly) for regular access to a product/service under one or more subscription plans. The transaction amount gets deducted from the paymode selected by a customer at periodic intervals, towards the regular purchases. This plan should include and must display the following details to the customer on your app or website:

Amount/Max Amount
Frequency
Start & End Date

Once the customer chooses a plan, create the subscription and get the unique Subscription ID.

Activate Subscription

Once the subscription is created, customer chooses a payment instrument and paytm provides a one-time consent to:

To make the first payment*
To make all future payments automatically from the selected paymode as per the subscription plan specified while creating the subscription.

*Note: The first payment deduction is not required if you want to start payment deduction from a later date. For Wallet, UPI, & Debit/Credit cards, INR 1 token amount would be deducted to complete the authorization process.

When a subscription is authorized and the first payment is deducted (if required), the subscription moves into the ACTIVE state. This subscription is now ready for you to be able to collect payments against it.

Collect Payment

Paytm subscription offers 2 options to collect payments:

Automatic Collect: Paytm would automatically attempt to charge the user on the next payment due date as per the subscription contract decided in Step 1(Create). Every time, Paytm would automatically process the transaction and provide a confirmation to you.

Manual Collect: You can send a request to a customer on/before the due date. As long as the payment request is valid as per the chosen subscription plan, Paytm will process the payment and provide a confirmation to you once the linked payment instrument has been charged.

Note: For Variable Amount/ On-demand and Daily frequency subcriptions, It is mandatory to collect payments manually.

Understanding the different Subscription States

State	Description
INIT	When you create a subscription, it instantly moves to the INIT state which indicates the subscription has been created but pending for authentication.
ACTIVE	It indicates the subscription is active and ready to accept payments.
CLOSED	It indicates the subscription is closed due to incomplete authorization. If the user is still interested, you need to create a new subscription ID.
SUSPENDED	It indicates the subscription has been suspended/paused and cannot accept any fresh payment requests at this point of time. An action may be required by user to make the subscription Active again, to accept payment requests.
EXPIRED	It indicates the subscription has passed its expiry date and cannot accept any fresh payment requests.
REJECT	It indicates the subscription has been cancelled/rejected and cannot accept any fresh payment requests.
AUTHORISED	It indicates the customer has completed the authorization. However, an additional action may be required to make the subscription Active. In the case of wallet, the customer completes the authorization post OTP verification, however, the first payment/token amount has not been deducted. In the case of Bank Mandates, the customer completes the authorization post successful authentication, however, Paytm has not received a confirmation from its sponsor bank for activation. In the case of Cards and UPI, the Subscription moves straight from authorized to ACTIVE state.

1. Create Subscription

You display different subscription plans with their respective payment schedule & amount to the customer. Once the customer selects and confirms a suitable plan, send a server-to-server request to Initiate Subscription and get a Subscription ID and Transaction Token in response.

Subscription ID This is a unique Paytm ID linked to the subscription contract. It should be stored in your system as it may be required to renew and cancel the subscription.
Transaction Token This token enables you to call all the subsequent APIs in the creation of a subscription from your frontend with a validity of 15 minutes from the time it is created.

At this step, you can also enable automatic features like Auto Collect, Auto Retry, Communication Manager. To know more about these features click here.

2. Activate Subscription

Paytm offers multiple checkout solutions to support subscription activation. Depending on the experience that you wish to provide to your customers, you can choose the checkout solutions to support subscription activation.

We will help you choose the right solution to boost your business based on your requirement.

Question: Select the platform which is mostly used by your customers?

Question: How do you want your Payment/Checkout page?

Recommended Solution: All-in-One SDK

We recommend the “All-in-One SDK” solution which provides a swift, secure and seamless subscription activation experience to your users by invoking the Paytm App (if installed on your user’s smartphone) or via web view within All in one SDK (if Paytm app is not installed) to complete payment for your order.

This solution has the following advantages

Paytm All-in-One SDK enables payment acceptance via Paytm balance, Debit card ,Credit card, bank mandates, BHIM UPI leveraging the Paym’s saved instruments repository.
It is a light weight SDK with quick integration steps.
It supports assist Auto Capture OTP with no separate integration in mobile apps.

For more details, please visit https://paytmpayments.com/docs/subscription/all-in-one-sdk/

3. Collect Payment

Subscription Pre Notify (Mandatory for UPI & Wallet paymodes)

For UPI & Wallet paymodes, it is mandatory for the issuers (Banks/Wallet providers) to send a pre-transaction notification to the user. For subscriptions created via Cards or Bank Mandates, you can ignore this step. The notification should include the following details:

Name of the merchant
Reference Number of Debit/Subscription
Transaction Amount
Date/Time of debit
Reason for debit

Use the Subscription Pre-Notify API* to trigger the notification at least 48 hours prior initiating the debit. Once Paytm gets the confirmation, you can use the Subscription Pre-Notify Callback to get the confirmation of the notification delivery. Alternatively, you can use the Subscription Pre-Notify Check Status to get the confirmation.

*This API must be mandatorily used for Variable Amount Subscriptions in case of subscriptions created via UPI & Wallet paymodes. For Fixed Amount Subscriptions as well, use this API. Else, reach out to us to enable these notifications to be triggered by Paytm on your behalf.

Automatic Collect
On the due date as specified per the Subscription contract, Paytm would automatically process the payment deduction. Once the transaction is confirmed then a Payment S2S callback is provided on your configured callback URL by Paytm. Paytm would automatically retry these transactions (as defined at the time of creating the subscription). To know more about retries click here Additionally, you can do a status query from time to time using the Transaction Status API.

Manual Collect
In conformity with the business contract, you can use the Renewal API to initiate the payment deduction. At this step, the request is validated against the original subscription plan and the acknowledgment is shared with you. Once the transaction is processed by Paytm, then a Payment S2S callback is provided on your configured callback URL by Paytm. Additionally, you can do a status query from time to time using the Transaction Status API.

4. Cancel Subscription

A merchant/customer can cancel/revoke an existing subscription anytime using the Cancel Subscription API and cannot be reused.

Customers can also cancel the subscription any time directly with the bank or on the Paytm App (in case, the user was logged-in to Paytm at the time of Subscription creation). In such scenarios, Paytm will provide an S2S Callback to you to confirm the cancellation.

Note: In case of issues related to subscription product or integration steps, browse through these FAQs to find answers to commonly raised questions.

On completion of your integration

Post completion of integration on your staging environment, do a complete transaction from order summary page on your website or mobile app

Attempt a test transaction using test paymodes credentials
Ensure you re-verify transaction response with Subscription Status API via server to server call in Subscription flow and not separately as a one time activity
See the transaction details in “Test Data” mode on your dashboard

Once the test transaction is complete, move your code to live environment with production account details. Note that production accounts details are available after you have activated your account on the dashboard

Lastly, it's recommended that you read about Managing Refunds and late payment notifications

In case of any issues with integration, please get in touch.