Frequently asked questions

This page provides a curated list of the most frequently asked questions by Rebilly customers. If you have a question that is not answered on this page, contact us.

General FAQs

What is Rebilly? How can it help my business?

Rebilly provides a platform for processing online payments that enables merchants to centrally manage payment gateways, services, and customers within a single system. This provides you with increased scalability and compliance with reduced overhead.

Rebilly supports over 199 payment gateways and more than 167 payment methods. By using Rebilly, you avoid the complex and time-consuming process of individually integrating payment gateways and methods — you get all this out-of-the-box. For more information, see Welcome to Rebilly.

What makes Rebilly qualified to handle my payments?

Rebilly is a level 1 PCI-DSS service provider. Rebilly goes beyond industry standards to meet a high level of data security at every layer, from server hardening techniques and network segmentation to extensive data integrity logging, secure coding practices, and rigorous testing. Rebilly is also SOC 2 compliant. This means that sensitive data is managed securely within the context of SaaS and other cloud-based services.

Rebilly has handled over 10 million credit and debit cards, processed tens of millions of transactions in dozens of currencies, and helped our clients collect over $2 billion in payments. For more information on payment processing and Rebilly, see Payment processing.

What support options does Rebilly offer?

The Rebilly 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?

Rebilly is beneficial for businesses that:

• Need to manage multiple payment gateways and payment methods.
• Sell products or services in a number of countries.
• Plan to scale their business to sell products or services in multiple countries.
• Have a business model that requires recurring payments, such as subscriptions.
• Need to provide customers with metered billing or usage-based billing for products or services.

For more information and to help you determine whether this product is for you, see Rebilly and you.

If you would like to discuss your specific needs, contact us.

Pricing

For more information on pricing, see the Pricing page.

How does the free trial work?

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

How do the Rebilly pricing plans work?

Your first 30 days are free. After that, your pricing is based on the plan you select and the number of transactions processed.

To view all pricing plans and related details, see Pricing. If you have any questions, contact us.

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, contact us.

Do the Rebilly fees include merchant service fees?

No. Financial institutions charge their own fees separately, and merchants are responsible for those merchant account fees. For information on terms like merchant account, see Glossary.

Accepting payments

For information on how payment processing works and what Rebilly provides, see Payment processing.

Does Rebilly work with my payment gateway?

Rebilly supports more than 199 payment gateways, and is consistently integrating adding more. If Rebilly is not integreted with a gateway you use, or would like to use, Rebilly will integrate it for free. For more information, see Gateway integration requests.

To view a list of supported payment gateways, see Gateways.

What is a payment gateway, and what is a merchant account?

A payment gateway is a service which enables a business to receive payments from customers to their merchant bank account. A merchant account is a bank account that enables businesses to receive payments. For more information, see Payment gateways.

To process payments, you need at least one payment gateway account. For more information what on you need to use Rebilly, see Prerequisites.

Can I use my existing gateway and merchant account?

Absolutely. The desire to avoid vendor lock-in with a payment service provider inspired the creation of Rebilly. Rebilly is gateway agnostic — clients can use whatever combination makes the most sense for their business.

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

Rebilly does not handle the money. Rebilly manages the payment process using your payment gateways. When money is settled, it goes directly through your merchant acquirer into your bank account.

For more information on how the payment process works, see Payment processing.

What happens if a transaction fails or gets declined?

There are two types of transactions:

• Cardholder initiated: Transactions initiated by the customer.
• Merchant initiated: Transactions initiated by you or Rebilly (rebill).

A cardholder-initiated transaction occurs when a cardholder is on a checkout page trying to place an order. If the transaction is declined, you can present a message to your customer and offer them an opportunity to try paying again.

A merchant-initiated transaction is often a recurring payment that Rebilly triggers at a pre-scheduled time. To prevent declined transactions, create autopay schedules to retry the payment, and invoice retry automations to retry the payment on the invoice. For help defining your retry strategy, see The Retry Strategy: How to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value by a Minimum of 43%.

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. Rebilly also simplifies reporting by translating payment amounts at the time of each transaction to your functional currency.

Rebilly also provides dynamic currency conversion (DCC), which is a feature that presents the customer with the option to be billed in the original transaction currency or the customer’s native currency.

What payment methods does Rebilly accept?

Rebilly supports more than 167 payment methods. To view a list of supported payment methods, see Payment methods.

If you would like to add a payment method that is not currently supported, Rebilly will integrate it for free. For more information, see Payment method requests.

Subscriptions

Can I create custom subscription plans?

Yes, you can create as many as you want. Most of our customers have just a few, but some have hundreds, and a few have over a thousand. Keep in mind, fewer is probably better — if you overwhelm customers with too many plans, they’re less likely to buy any of them. For more information, see Create a pricing plan.

Can I bill my customers more than once a month?

Yes, there are no limits on how you configure your billing schedule. For more information, see the recurring option when creating a pricing plan.

Does Rebilly support one-time transactions?

Yes. For more information, see the one-time sale option when creating a pricing plan.

Can I offer a free trial?

Yes. For more information, see the trial only option when creating a pricing plan.

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

If a plan is in use, you can’t delete it. If you want to change the price for all customers 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.

To change the price of a plan for a customer, you can issue an interm invoice for the difference in price or prorate the difference in price on the next invoice. Alternatively, you can issue a quote to the customer for the new pricing plan. If the customer accepts the quotation, the changes are applied to the subscription. For more information, see Edit a subscription.

Can I reactivate a canceled subscription?

Yes. The reactivation process generates a quote for the proposed subscription reactivation and issues it to the customer. If the customer accepts the quote, the order is reactivated based on the defined and fulfilled acceptance conditions. For more information, see Reactivate a subscription.

Can I pause a subscription?

Yes. For more information, see Pause a subscription.

Can I create subscriptions without billing information?

No. You can create a subscription without taking a payment, for example, if you are offering a free trial or if billing periods are postpaid. However, you cannot create a subscription without the customer’s basic information, such as their name and address, which is used to generate an invoice.

Can I track billing data for multiple companies?

Rebilly uses the concept of 'organizations' to facilitate this. An organization represents you or your company as a merchant. You can create multiple organizations within your Rebilly account, and a single user account can be associated with multiple organizations. For more information, see My organizations and websites.

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

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

To set a dynamic descriptor, see the Configure card statement descriptions option in the gateway account settings.

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

Renewals

How will Rebilly help reduce churn?

In subscription-based businesses, credit card errors (like expired cards) often cause 5-15% involuntary churn. Rebilly provides industry-leading decline logic and automations that help to reduce this. To reduce churn, see Involuntary churn and how to reduce it.

Can Rebilly help with declined payment?

Yes. You can create autopay schedules to retry the payment, and invoice retry automations to retry the payment on the invoice. For help defining your retry strategy, see The Retry Strategy: How to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value by a Minimum of 43%.

What dunning capabilities does Rebilly provide?

Rebilly automates emails and provides functionality like split testing, so that you can determine which messages work best for your customers. For more information, see Notifications.

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

No. Payments for recurring bills are collected automatically when the payment is due. Rebilly offers autopay, which collects the payment automatically when the payment is due — no login required. For more information, see Autopay.

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

Yes. Rebilly offers several ways to keep customer credit card numbers up to date.

Automated email notifications

You can use automated email notifications to:

• Remind customers to update their payment card information before their payment card expires.
• Inform customers when their payment card is expired.
• Inform customers when a transaction is declined.

For more information, see Create event-based customer email notifications and use the 'Payment card expiration reminder', 'Payment card expired', and 'Transaction declined' events.

Automated actions

You can use automated actions to:

• Guess the new expiration date of an expired payment card. For more information, see Guess payment card expiration.
• Use autopay schedules to retry the payment, and invoice retry automations to retry the payment on the invoice. For help defining your retry strategy, see The Retry Strategy: How to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value by a Minimum of 43%.

Account updater services

Additionally, some issuers offer services such as MasterCard Automatic Billing Updater and Visa Account Updater to automatically keep card-on-file data current for expired, lost, or upgraded cards. Participation varies by issuer and country.

We recommend using Account Updater services for a seamless experience, ensuring customer records stay updated, preventing involuntary churn, and eliminating the need for customers to manually update their information.

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?

Rebilly helps protect you from fraud by providing the following fraud protection:

• Transaction risk scoring: Use risk scoring to automatically manage the level of risk that is associated with each transaction, and to automate specific actions based on that level of risk. A common use case for risk scoring is to add a customer to a blocklist and to stop the transaction.
• Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD): Use EDD to confirm customer-provided information against public sources for multiple risk factors such as arrest, fraud, bankruptcy, and occupation information. This feature provides search logs of every automatic check.
• 3 Domain Secure (3DS): 3DS is an authentication method used by merchants to validate cardholders. The cardholder authenticates their card against the issuing bank's website. The merchant chooses whether to use 3D secure. This enables the merchant to shift liability from themselves to the issuing bank. 3DS requires cardholder interaction.
• Device fingerprinting: A device fingerprint is a unique identifier for a device. It is generated from specific device characteristics, such as: operating system, browser, and IP address. Device fingerprints are used to identify devices and prevent fraud.
• Blocklists: Use blocklists to prevent fraud and criminal activity. Blocklists are lists of customer attribute values that are blocked from buying from you. For example, if a customer attempts to make a purchase from you with a credit card or fingerprint that is in a blocklist, the transaction is blocked and will not be processed.
• Dispute and fraud management: Use Rebilly to automate the dispute process, manage evidence, save time, and reduce human error.

Rebilly also provides a Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money laundering (AML) add-on to help you comply with regulations and prevent fraud.

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

Rebilly provides a single technical structure for processing online payments and enables merchants to centrally manage payment gateways, services, and customers within a single system. This centralizes your reporting into one location, making it easier for you to analyze and determine the source of the chargebacks. You can also automate email notifications to alert your team when chargebacks occur, enabling them to respond appropriately, cancel subscriptions, or add information to blocklists.

To create automated email notifications when chargebacks occur, see Create event-based customer email notifications, and use the 'Dispute Created' event.

For more information, see Dispute and fraud management.

Who is responsible for chargebacks?

Rebilly is not the merchant bank. For example, for a transaction, the financial chain would go from the cardholder to the issuing bank, then to Visa, the acquiring bank, and finally back to the merchant. Rebilly is not involved in that exchange, and does 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 some transactions are 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.

Rebilly has 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, see PCI compliance and security or contact us directly.

Do you store credit card information?

Yes. Rebilly vaults all the data securely and complies with PCI DSS. Rebilly vaults the data and does not outsource this to a third-party company. Rebilly is PCI DSS level 1 compliant and SOC 2 compliant.

For more information, see Tokenization and vaulting and PCI compliance and security.

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 transmit cardholder data through your systems, you need to complete a SAQ-D. To complete this correctly can take anywhere from 1-6 months, depending on your preparedness. By using Rebilly, you eliminate all storage and transmission of cardholder data, and can fill out a simple SAQ-A in a matter of minutes.

For more information, see PCI compliance and security.

Does Rebilly have downtime?

Yes. There are two main kinds of downtime:

• Planned downtime
• Unplanned downtime

Rebilly strives for 100% uptime, and uses Pingdom and Datadog as external third-party services to monitor uptime.

Rebilly publishes uptime at https://status.rebilly.com.

How do I cancel my account?

Cancel your account at any time by emailing Rebilly at support@rebilly.com.

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

Yes, you can export your data if you cancel your Rebilly account.

Developers

How do I integrate Rebilly?

To integrate Rebilly, follow the Get started guides.

Where do I learn about Rebilly resources and the relationship between them?

To learn about the components of the Rebilly product, see Concepts.

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

Yes. Rebilly provides an API and webhook notifications that you can use to connect to any system. Rebilly also has built-in integrations. For example, with Email service providers, such as: Mailgun, Sendgrid, and AWS SES.

How do I integrate the Rebilly API?

Create a Rebilly account, and then read the Rebilly API docs.

Does Rebilly provide SDKs?

Yes. For more information, see SDKs.