Tenants operating a SVOD model require a payment flow that enables an end user to enter a contract allowing a payment to be charged to their account periodically; usually monthly. This contract may optionally allow a free trial period during which the end user is entitled to access SVOD content for a limited period of time before the first payment is charged to their account. This contract is referred to hereon in as the subscription plan.
The subscription plan is fulfilled by the integrated payment gateway so the Payment Service will be responsible for creating the subscription plan and it’s pre-requisites and responding appropriately to acknowledgements (response to a request) and notifications (callback / webhook).
Although the Payment Service is responsible for managing third party payment gateway resources, the consuming service (i.e. the tenant’s website) has the responsibility of instructing the Payment Service to do so.
Key Flows
Create Subscription
The following flowchart depicts the process involved in creating a subscription for an end user. Once this process is completed the end user will have had the appropriate subscription details appended to their user profile.
Recurring Payments
Once a subscription is created the 3rd party payment gateway will be responsible for charging the agreed amount to the account on the agreed schedule.The 3rd party payment gateway will also be responsible for notifying the payment service each time the account is successfully charged.
Upon receiving such a notification, the payment service will update it’s subscription to reflect the subscription period convered by the payment taken.
Occasionally payments do fail but there are two types of decline, Hard and Soft. Soft declines are often the result of a temporary issue and may be successful on subsequent attempts. However hard declines should not be retried as the reason for the decline is not temporary and are likely to remain unsuccessful on subsequent attempts.
The payment service expects the 3rd party payment gateway to be able to handle soft declines by making subsequent attempts. However, if the this is not possible or the number of failed attempts breaches the limit imposed by the payment gateway, the payment service expects that the payment gateway will treat this as a hard decline to the extent that it will not retry to take the payment and will notify the payment service that the payment will not be fulfilled.
Subscription Cancelled
Once an end user has a subscription agreement, they must be able to cancel the agreement. When this occurs the Payment Gateway must be instructed to prevent any further payments being charged to the account and the subscription in the user profile service must be updated to reflect this state. A subscription will only be marked as fully cancelled once the payment service receives a notification from the Payment Gateway inidicating that the subscription has been cancelled
