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Payments in Hyperline

In most cases, Hyperline manages payment collection and reconciliation for you. But sometimes, payments can fail for a variety of reasons, resulting in unpaid invoices.

When an invoice is issued and ready to be paid, Hyperline will attempt to charge the active payment method of the customer by initiating a payment. This is the basic use case for Credit Cards and Direct Debit.

The payment method should have been previously added by the customer through checkout or portal page.

Bank transfer payments and manual reconciliation 💡

Note that if the customer pays by bank transfer, we send the invoice to be paid by email and the reconciliation needs to be done manually on Hyperline (learn how to proceed on this page). If you connected a PSP, no action is required on your part.

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Errors and retry

In certain situations, payment can fail (payment method expired, payment declined, processing issue on the bank side, etc.). For the relevant cases, we will attempt to retry the payment with the following schedule:

  • 2 hours after the first attempt
  • 12 hours after the second attempt
  • 24 hours after the 3rd attempt

For each attempt, a new transaction is created for the invoice. If all the attempts fail, we will mark the invoice as “error”.

When a customer has multiple invoices in error and adds an automated payment method (credit card, direct debit), all previous invoices will be charged immediately.

If you are technically integrated

This state corresponds to the error status on the invoice API, and to the invoice.errored webhook message.

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Subscription error

Additionally, if the invoice is related to a running subscription, we will switch the subscription to a payment errored state.

Following this, we will consider the subscription as inactive (as the customer failed to pay you) meaning that we won’t invoice the customer in the future nor collect payment.

Invoices in Open state will stay in this state for as long as the subscription is paused.

This behaves as a paused subscription.

In this case, we offer you the choice to manually re-activate the subscription (the invoice will remain unpaid) or fully cancel it.

This state corresponds to the errored status on the subscription API, and to the subscription.errored webhook message. This state can be used to switch off the access to your product or move your customer to a free product access.

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Manual retry

If you wish to manually retry the payment of an invoice with a failed transaction, click on Charge invoice in the invoice actions dropdown.

If the new payment is successful, the invoice will now be paid and the subscription will automatically switch back to the live state if the customer is still in the period of the subscription

This will correspond to an active status on the subscription API, and to a subscription.activated webhook message

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Customer notification

If the problem can be resolved by your customer, for example, because their card has expired or declined and needs to be replaced, or because they do not have sufficient funds on the card and need to act accordingly, we will inform them by email, telling them that they can manage their payment on their dedicated portal page (with a link pointing to it).

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Error types

You can retrieve on the invoice the related transactions with the following error_type if the status is failed:

  • authentication_required: The card was declined as the transaction requires authentication (e.g.3-D Secure). The customer should go to their portal page and authenticate their card. If the error happened on an already authenticated transaction, the customer needs to contact their card issuer for more information.

  • payment_method_authorization_error: A transaction authorization cannot be created for a variety of reasons such as the card issuer couldn’t be reached, or the card requires a PIN.

  • payment_method_declined: The payment method was declined for a variety of reasons such as a card reported as lost or stolen, insufficient funds or reaching the limit available on the method to complete the purchase, a payment method on a known block list, etc.

  • payment_method_expired: The payment method is expired. The customer should go to their portal page and change their payment method.

  • payment_method_invalid: The payment method is invalid in most cases because of incorrect details (card/account number, CVC, expiration date, postal code).

  • payment_method_not_supported: The payment method doesn’t support this type of purchase (e.g. currency, online payment).

  • declined: The payment was declined for a variety of reasons such as security violation, banking service not available, transaction not allowed, etc.

  • fraud: The payment provider suspected the transaction was fraudulent and has been blocked. Don’t report more detailed information to your customer, and check on your provider account.

  • processing_error: The payment couldn’t be processed by the issuer for an unknown reason.

  • provider_error: An error occurred when contacting the payment provider to initiate the transaction.

  • unknown: A generic error happened on the payment provider side.

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Be notified of an errored invoice/subscription for a customer

If, as the merchant, you want to be notified when one of the invoices for your customer enters an error state because of a failed payment, you can implement multiple strategies.

If you are comfortable with the technical webhook

You can set up a handler on the invoice.errored or subscription.errored message. See more details on the using webhooks page.

You can also leverage a no-code solution with our native Zapier app to connect the tool of your choice and trigger internal action on your side: notify a Slack channel, change state in one of your internal tools, email a specific team, etc.