Add ability to create order entries for recuring payments when using subscription payment providers

[richardinitial]

I am reaching out to inquire about the implementation of a subscription renewal confirmation email within Umbraco. Specifically, I would like to know if this feature is already available. If not, I would appreciate guidance on how to implement such a feature.

Version:

Umbraco: 13.4.1
Umbraco Commerce: 13.1.17

Details:

I am using Stripe as my payment provider.
Initially, I thought about using a webhook to monitor the invoice.payment_succeeded event and, in that case, send an email template.
However, I am raising this question because this feature might already exist, and other users might have had the same need.

Questions:

1. Is there an existing feature in Umbraco for sending subscription renewal confirmation emails?
2. If this feature is not available, could you please provide some insights or steps on how to implement it?

[mattbrailsford]

Umbraco Commerce and the Stripe payment provider are really only designed to be the trigger point of creating the subscription, so everything to do with the maintenance of the subscription after this point needs to be implemented custom.

The easiest option here is to configure Stripe to send out it's own notification emails as there are options within Stripe to do this. If you want to do it using your own custom email templates, then yea, implementing your own webhook handler from stripe, and then using our IEmailTemplateService to trigger the sending of an email would also work.

[marvingbh]

@mattbrailsford, I understand that external integrations should be handled externally, but since Umbraco is our main commerce platform, it's problematic that only the initial payment is recorded. This creates an accounting issue because the sales data in Umbraco doesn't match Stripe due to recurring payments.

I need a way to register recurring payments within Umbraco to keep records aligned. In our previous setup with Shopify/Recharge, each recurring order was logged as a new order in Shopify, ensuring accurate tracking. Is there a recommended approach to achieve something similar in Umbraco?

[mattbrailsford]

Umbraco Commerce isn't accounting software so as such shouldn't be considered your single source of truth. For subscriptions, we consider the "purchase" as buying the subscription.

If you need to put those recuring purchases back into Umbraco then you'd want to setup a custom webhook and then generate a new order from the details. The subscription should hold a reference to the original order so you could link them back in some way, maybe via a custom property on the order.

[richardinitial]

We have the orderId in the Metadata property of the Invoice object returned from Stripe, so we could definitely do that.

[mattbrailsford]

The order should already hold an order reference which is made up of the order ID and order Number

[marvingbh]

got it, we will do that, but maybe is a nice feature to include in future versions of Umbraco.

[mattbrailsford]

Appreciate the feedback. I'll re-title this discussion to reflect more clearly the feature request 👍