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Frequently asked questions

A curated list of the most commonly asked questions by Rebilly customers. Can't find your question? Let us know!

General FAQs

What is Rebilly? How can it help my business?

Rebilly is a payments solution that helps move more customers from your pricing page to your thank you page. It’s tailored to tackle the unique challenges of global businesses — with over 199+ gateway integrations, 167+ supported payment methods, and 156+ supported currencies. We offer a host of products to support your payments including risk management and billing solutions.

What makes Rebilly qualified to handle my payments?

Rebilly is safe and secure. We’ve handled over 10 million credit and debit cards. We’ve processed tens of millions of transactions in dozens of currencies, and helped our clients collect over $2 billion of payments that would have otherwise slipped through the cracks. And we’re just getting started…

What support options do you offer?

Our knowledgeable support team is there to help you from 7 AM to 7 PM central time on weekdays. You can email us at support@rebilly.com, chat with us or schedule a talk with a billing specialist. Technical support escalations are available 24/7/365. We also offer a dedicated shared slack channel for our enterprise clients.

Is Rebilly for me?

Do you connect with multiple payment gateways and methods? Do you have customers in multiple countries? Do you want to future-proof your payments? Do you have subscribers? Do you run offers for your subscriptions? Do you need help controlling issues related to subscription billing? Finally, do you love data and testing?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, Rebilly might be for you. Check out this blog post for an expanded answer on this, click the chat icon at the bottom of this page, or visit the contact page.

Pricing


How does the free trial work?

It's pretty simple — your first 30 days are completely free.

How do Rebilly’s pricing plans work?

Your first 30 days are free, and after that, your pricing is based on the plan you’ve selected and the number of transactions processed.

View complete pricing details on our pricing page here. If you have any questions, please ping us on chat or talk with a billing specialist.

Does Rebilly require a long-term contract?

No. Rebilly is a month-to-month service and you can cancel at any time. However, we do offer advantageous long-term contracts. If you are interested, please contact us at support@rebilly.com.

Do the Rebilly fees include the Merchant Service fees?

No. Financial institutions separately charge their own fees, and merchants are responsible for those merchant account fees.

(Not sure what a merchant account is? See our payment term definitions.

Accepting payments


Does Rebilly work with _ payment gateway?

Probably! We integrate with more than 199 payment gateways. We work hard to provide a wide selection of payment gateways so that you have the option and flexibility to use the payment gateways that work best for your business.

If we aren't currently integrated with your selected gateway(s), we can likely complete a new integration in 1-3 weeks at no cost.

To view a list of our integrated payment gateways, click here. If you don't see yours, get in touch with us through our contact page or the chat button at the bottom of this page.

What is a payment gateway?

You will need a payment gateway to get started with Rebilly. Payment gateways are responsible for processing transactions and distributing funds into your merchant bank account. It’s the online equivalent to card swipe machine in stores.

Rebilly is a payment gateway, connected directly to processing platforms. Rebilly is also a payment gateway that can make connections to other payment gateways.

For more payment terms definitions, click here.

What is a merchant account?

You will also need a merchant account to get started with Rebilly. A merchant account is a specific type of bank account built for businesses, which lets them accept payments (usually using debit or credit cards, but sometimes using other means).

For more payment terms definitions, click here.

How do I get a merchant account?

To accept credit and debit card payments in general, you'll need a merchant account. To get one, you'll apply with a merchant account provider. There are many providers, and the one that's best for you will depend on your business. We'd be happy to consult with you and recommend one if needed.

Can I use my existing gateway and merchant account?

Absolutely. The desire to avoid vendor lock-in with a payment service provider was a major factor in inspiring Rebilly's creation. We believe our clients want the same control that we did, so we’re gateway agnostic — allowing our clients to use whatever combination makes the best business sense for them.

How do I receive payments? Does Rebilly handle the money?

Rebilly doesn’t touch the money. We are a payment gateway and send messages to authorize and capture the transactions. When the money settlement happens, it goes directly through your merchant acquirer into your bank account.

What happens if a transaction fails or gets declined?

We can view transactions in two categories: those initiated by the cardholder (customer), and those initiated by you or us (called merchant-initiated, or sometimes, in slang, a rebill).

A cardholder initiated transaction may be that a cardholder is on a checkout page trying to place an order. If a transaction is declined, in that case, you can present your customer a message and an opportunity to attempt to pay again.

A merchant-initiated transaction is often going to be a recurring payment, that Rebilly triggers at a pre-scheduled time. If that merchant-initiated transaction is declined, we recommend following our retry strategy.

What currencies does Rebilly support?

Rebilly supports all ~140 of the free-traded currencies. You can configure plan pricing and charge customers in any currency you want. We also simplify reporting by translating payment amounts at the time of each transaction to your functional currency.

We also offer dynamic currency conversion (DCC), which is a feature that allows you to present to the customer the choice to be billed in the original transaction currency or the customer’s native currency.

What payment methods does Rebilly accept?

Currently, we accept:

ACHDiscoverInvoiceQQPay
AlipayDomestic CardsJCBSkrill Rapid Transfer
American ExpresseCheckJetonSMSVoucher
Astropay CardePay.bgKlarnaUPayCard
Bank TransferEPSMaestroVisa
BitcoinFlexepinMasterCardVoucher
BoletoGiropayOchaPayVoyager
Cash DepositGpaysafeOnline Bank TransferWeChat Pay
China UnionPayiDEALPayPal
Diners ClubInstant Bank TransferPhone

If you don't see the payment method you need, please let us know.

Managing subscriptions


Can I create custom subscription plans?

Yes, as many as you want. Most of our customers have just a few, but some have hundreds, and a couple of them have over a thousand. Keep in mind, fewer is probably better -- if you overwhelm customers with too many available plans, they’re less likely to buy any of the plans.

Can I bill my customers more than once a month?

Yes! There are no limits on how you want to configure your billing schedule.

Does Rebilly support one-time transactions as well?

Yes. When creating a plan, go to the billing schedule section and select the option “Recurs never” to create a one-time sale.

What happens to accounts (customers) that subscribe to a plan if I change the price or delete the plan?

Once a plan is used, you can deactivate it, but you won’t be able to delete it. If you want to change the price, across the board, you can create a new pricing plan. Then, you can make that available to new customers.

If you want to move existing customers from the old pricing to the new one, you can do that too by migrating them to the new plan. Make sure you inform your customers in advance of moving them to a different pricing plan.

Can I create subscriptions without billing information?

No. You can create it without taking a payment, but you cannot create a subscription without having your customer’s basic information (the information used to compose an invoice, like the customer’s name and address).

Product + pricing plan + order + customer = subscription

Can I track billing data for multiple companies?

Yes. We have something we call “organizations,” which allows you to create multiple organizations within your Rebilly account.

Can I change my company name or how charges appear on a customer’s credit card statements?

Yes. A dynamic descriptor (sometimes called a soft descriptor) allows you to control what appears on the billing statement. Often, there is a requirement for dynamic descriptors to be pre-approved, or they must be prefixed with something common (My-Company*my product). Rebilly supports dynamic descriptors.

Simply go to “Gateway account” and look under “Advanced configuration”.

Note: Not all of the payment gateway integrations support dynamic descriptors. To find out if your payment services provider supports them, please contact us. Your payment services provider may need to enable the feature for you as well.

Renewals


How will Rebilly help us reduce churn?

When you’re running a subscription-based business, credit card errors (like an expired card) often drive involuntary churn to typical rates ranging from 5-15%. Our industry-leading decline logic automatically corrects most error types without you (or your customers) needing to do anything.

Rebilly’s automatic correction and retry features can help decrease your involuntary churn and make sure you can spend your energy where it matters most -- providing a stellar product and service.

Can Rebilly help with declined payment?

Yes. With Rebilly, you can automatically retry declined payments, based on the optimal time to maximize approvals on your renewals.

How advanced are Rebilly’s dunning capabilities?

Rebilly’s capabilities are second to none.

We like to think of “dunning” as part of a wider campaign to get more renewals paid. Technically, “dunning” would refer to the automated emails, text messages, letters, phone calls, or other communications that would go to customers to let them know they have an outstanding unpaid invoice.

While we help automate the emails, and have advanced functionality, like split testing of the email messages, so you can hone in on which messages work best for your customers, it’s really just part of a broader campaign of things to do.

Do my customers need to log in every month to pay?

No. We make paying recurring bills easier for your customers by offering autopay, which collects their payment automatically when the payment is due — no login required.

Is there an automated way to keep customer credit card numbers up to date?

To get more renewals paid, you should be utilizing account updater. You should also have an expiration date guesser, as well as soliciting new expiration dates from those customers which you could not update through automated means.

In addition to that, you should have an automated retry strategy in place to retry the payment at the day and time it is most likely to be approved.

Does Rebilly accept partial payments?

Yes. Sometimes customers can’t afford to pay in full. In that instance, Rebilly gives you the ability to accept a partial payment, to improve your customer experience and your earnings.

Reducing risk


How can I fight fraud with Rebilly?

There’s nothing more frustrating than fraud, so we created a suite of tools to help you fight it. We would recommend starting with these:

  1. Using our device fingerprinting (which is included as part of our FramePay solution).
  2. Add risk-scoring based on transaction-velocity (how many transactions from a single source you will accept within a 24-hour period). After that cap is hit, increment the risk-score, and blocklist the customer for 1 hour to prevent further attempts for that hour.
  3. Add risk-scoring based on if the issuing bank country matches the customer’s geographic location (determined based on their IP address).
  4. Add risk-scoring based on if the billing address country matches the customer’s geographic location (determine based on their IP address).

These would be the first 4 steps to complete, and they only take about 5 minutes to set up.

Does Rebilly offer an automated way to reduce chargebacks, and to respond and win them more easily?

Yes. Rebilly offers device fingerprinting to help prevent fraud. It also offers risk scoring, blocklists. Furthermore, Rebilly offers chargeback reporting.

Being able to centralize your reporting into one location makes it easier for you to analyze and determine the source of the chargebacks -- are they coming from a specific customer? Issuing bank? For a specific product? From a particular marketing campaign? From a certain geographic location? Rebilly will help you pinpoint that and give you the tools to handle that as you see fit.

Rebilly’s rules engine will allow you to automate certain workflows such as alerting people when chargebacks come in so that they can be properly represented, or canceling subscriptions, and adding information to blocklists.

Who is responsible for chargebacks?

Rebilly is not the merchant bank. For an example transaction, the financial chain would go from the cardholder, to the issuing bank, to Visa, to the acquiring bank, and back to the merchant. Rebilly is not involved in that exchange, as we do not handle the money.

Everyone in that financial chain is ultimately responsible for chargebacks, but the buck stops with you. The exception would be if you had some transactions protected by 3D Secure, in which case, the buck may stop with the issuing bank.

Security


How secure is Rebilly?

Data security is hugely important to us at Rebilly. The major part of our security techniques come from the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, which includes, but are not limited to:

  • Network segmentation and strict firewall rules to make any kind of penetration impossible
  • Strong encryption of the stored cardholder data
  • Protection of cardholder data transmission through public networks (Qualys SSL Labs report)
  • Comprehensive code review for all features
  • Granular access management and extensive logging of all operations
  • Regular checks of possible vulnerabilities
  • Regular updates of operation systems, anti-malware and anti-virus software.

We’ve achieved the highest level of PCI DSS compliance, which includes a yearly full audit of our security practices and policies, as well as penetration testing, completed by a third party accredited by the PCI council. For more on security and Rebilly, visit our Security section, or contact us directly.

Do you store credit card information?

Yes. We vault all of the data securely and comply with PCI DSS. We vault them ourselves and do not outsource this to a third-party company. We are PCI DSS level 1 compliant.

Does my business need to be PCI compliant?

Yes. If your business accepts payment cards, it must be PCI DSS compliant. Rebilly helps you minimize your compliance burden, by keeping all sensitive cardholder data off of your systems -- in fact, never transmitted through your systems.

If you have cardholder data transmitted through your systems, you need to fill out, what is called the SAQ-D. To do it honestly and properly will take anywhere from 1-6 months, depending on your preparedness. However, since we eliminate all storage and transmission of cardholder data by using either our FramePay or hosted checkout pages, you can fill out a simple SAQ-A in a matter of minutes.

Does Rebilly have downtime?

Yes. There are two main kinds of downtime:

  • Planned downtime
  • Unplanned downtime

We strive for 100% uptime. We use Pingdom and Datadog as external 3rd parties to monitor our uptime.

We also publish our uptime at https://status.rebilly.com.

How do I cancel my account?

You cancel your account at any time by emailing us at support@rebilly.com.

What happens to all my data if I cancel my account? Can I export my data if needed?

Yes. Your transaction and customer data should never be held hostage, and yet, some payment gateways make it very difficult for you to get your data out when you need it. At Rebilly, we’ll make sure you always have access to the data you want, when you want it.

Developers


Can I connect Rebilly with my existing website and other systems?

Yes. Rebilly has an API and webhook notifications. Between the two, you should be able to connect it to any other system. Rebilly has some built-in integrations, such as with some Email Service Providers (like Mailgun, Sendgrid, and AWS SES).

How do I integrate the Rebilly API?

First, you should have a sandbox account. If you don’t have one yet, you can sign up here, and get a free sandbox account. Then, to get started, please read our API reference documentation.