Best Practices

The best practices are the guidelines or recommendations that make up the most effective course of action. These best practices have been refined over time and these refined practices can help your businesses to succeed and can ensure seamless experience with Paytm.
 

You can also follow these practices:

1. Enable Automatic/Manual Retries with grace period

   The retry feature for unsuccessful payment collection, is a solution for improving the collect payment success rate, in which the failed transactions are retriggered multiple times in the grace period set. Retries are allowed for the dates >= Payment collection date and <= Payment collection date + Grace days.
   At Paytm, we have the flexibility of both Manual as well as Automatic Retries facility-
   
   Automatic Retry
   For Automatic retry facility, we recommend enabling autoRetry feature at the time of subscription creation.
   If you setsubscriptionGraceDays = 2 and subscriptionRetryCount = 3., then the failed transaction will be automatically retried thrice in 3 days(including the recurring debit date), till the time you get a successful payment. You can mark the transaction as failed if all retries are failed and stop the service at your end. This autoretry feature requires no manual intervention from your side in case of failed transaction, and the transaction will be autoretried as per the grace days maintained.
   
   Manual Retry 
   We recommend you to set subscriptionGraceDays = 2 and subscriptionRetryCount = 3. You can then retry the transaction thrice in 3 days, till the time you get a successful payment. You can mark the transaction as failed after 3 attempts and stop the service at your end.
   
   Please note in the case of Bank Mandates,retries are not supported by Paytm as charges are applicable for failed renewals. You can cancel the existing order and initiate a new order ID for the failed renewal.

   Grace Days are not supported for Debit Card and Credit Card. Retries can only be initiated on the recurring debit date.

   The sample notification for failed payment collect- Dear Customer, We have failed to deduct INR XX.00 against collect payment request for <Merchant name>. Next attempt is scheduled for tomorrow. Kindly maintain sufficient balance in your wallet for seamless services.

2. Enable Automatic collect feature

   This feature makes the recurring payment collection run at auto-pilot mode. The recurring payment collection is automatically triggered with no manual intervention from your side. On the due date of the payment collection, as specified per the subscription contract during create subscription, 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.
   
   Please note for Variable Amount/ On-demand and Daily frequency subcriptions, It is mandatory to collect payments manually.
    

3. Enable Communication Manager feature

   This feature ensures triggering of notification to the customers at various touchpoints:
   1. Subscription Creation Notify
      Paytm sends automated contextual notifications for the event of subscription creation for your customers. These notification ensures that along with subscription details, the next payment due date and amount is conveyed to the customer.These notifications will be sent to the user via email/SMS.

      The sample format for the notification is- "Dear Customer, Your monthly subscription of Rs XX.00 has been created on <merchant name>, with upfront payment of INR YY.00. Your next payment is scheduled for <next payment date> for INR XX.00 from Wallet"

   2. Pre debit Notify
      Upon initiation by merchant or Paytm (in case of auto renewal), the pre-debit notification is sent by the issuing bank at least 24 hours prior to the payment deduction. Pre-debit notification is mandatory for Wallet, UPI , Credit and Debit cards.

      The sample format for the notification is- "Dear Customer, Your monthly payment is scheduled for <payment due date> for INR XX.00 on <merchant name> Kindly maintain sufficient balance in your Paytm Payments Bank Account for seamless services"

       

      Please note for Wallet, UPI the predebit notification is sent by the issuing bank atleast 24 hours prior to the payment deduction to your customers.
   3. Post transaction Notify
      Paytm sends automated notifications for the event of post transaction for your customers. These notification ensures that the name of the merchant, transaction amount, date / time of debit is conveyed to the customer.These notifications will be sent to the user via email/SMS.

      The sample format for notification- "Dear Customer, Your payment of INR XX.00 for monthly subscription with <merchant name> is successfully deducted from your Wallet."

       

4. Manage user drops

   In case you redirect the user and do not get back the response from Paytm, you have the flexibility to use the Get Subscription Status API to update the status of the Subscription at your end. You may create your own logic to check status, till the time you get a confirmed status from Paytm.

5. Subscription cancellation - Merchant, Paytm, Bank

   The user can cancel subscription via Merchant (Using Cancel API) or via Paytm App (In case user is logged-in) & Bank. In case the cancellation is triggered via Paytm or Bank, then you have the flexibility of configuring a webhook to ensure that the current cancelled status of the subscription is notified to you or you can check the status via the Subscription status API to get the response of the current subscription status.

6. Bank Mandate Guidelines for Duplicate Requests

   i. Any transaction that carries same combination of Corporate Utility Code, Corporate Sponsor Bank, Category Code, Customer Account Number, Max Amount/Fixed Amount, Destination Bank of any other transaction that is initiated on the same day will be considered as a duplicate request and gets rejected by NPCI.

    

   ii. Three new error codes added for merchants for identification of duplicate transactions:

   • 606 – “Duplicate Request” (If the customer initiates a duplicate transaction which is already successful)
   • 607 – “Request in progress” (if the customer initiates a duplicate transaction which is already in progress)
   • 608 – “Duplicate Request ” (if the customer initiate duplicate request which is already declined by Bank)

   iii. The duplicate request will be verified based on the same day transactions.

    

   iv. Among the bank rejection codes, for some reject codes the system will allow customer to initiate duplicate request for maximum 3 times while for other reason codes duplicate request will not be allowed. Please refer list of reject codes allowed for representation along with the limit.

7. Additional Guidelines for Bank Mandates

   In additional guidelines for bank mandates, it is required to display the summary page with details of customer, frequency, amount, start date, expiry date and purpose along with the bank account details, before redirecting customers to the bank page. The customer would be shown this pre-mandate creation page. This is an NPCI mandated requirement.
   To get more details, click here.

8. Create a variable subscription to support upgrades/downgrades in future

   To manage upgrades/downgrades in subscription, variable subscription with a maximum amount of 2000, can be set. Thus, any change in the subscription amount can be incorporated at the time of payment collection by sending the exact deduction amount in Renew Subscription API.

9. Card expiry notification

   This is a merchant level preference, in which one can opt to configure a Card expiry notification webhook, where prior to the deduction,the card expiration date will be checked, post which a notification is triggered to the customer informing about the expiry of the card, which has an active subscription on it.