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This guide will assist you in initiating your journey with Chargebee, ensuring a seamless and efficient start to leveraging its functionalities.
Whether you want to streamline your subscription billing, offer flexible pricing plans, manage customer subscriptions seamlessly, or provide a frictionless payment experience, integrating Chargebee is the key to achieving these goals effectively.
We recommend you follow these steps on your TEST Site. Once you have set up and tested your entire configuration and integration, you can refer to the go-live checklist to finalize your LIVE Site.
To seamlessly integrate Chargebee into your business operations, it's essential to start with the fundamentals to ensure a seamless transition.
Add your team members to collaborate for the successful integration.
Navigate to Settings > Team Members > click on + Invite Members to invite a team member to use Chargebee. Additionally, you can determine the user access level as well. To edit or remove a team member's role, click on the three dots next to the team member.
Learn more about roles.
Delete any sample or test data from your site before creating your own data.
Click Settings > Configure Chargebee > Test Site Data > click Delete or Repopulate Sample Data.
Set up all the currencies in which you want to sell your products to your customers. In addition to the base currency, you can process transactions in foreign currencies by adding more currencies.
To set up your currencies, click Settings > Configure Chargebee > Currencies > Add Currency.
Learn more about Currencies.
Set up billing frequencies at a site level, based on your business needs that will be available in all your Plans and Addons.
To set up, click Settings > Configure Chargebee > Billing > Product Catalog.
Learn more about setting up billing frequency.
Next, visit the product catalog module to set up your plans and products.
Product Catalog helps you define your product and service offerings and the price at which you want to sell those to your customers.
A product family in Chargebee is a way to organize and categorize your various products or services, along with their associated plans, addons, and charges.
It simplifies the management of your product catalog, making it easier to scale and offer different options to your customers.
A SaaS business offering CRM and HRMS can create separate product families for each application, grouping their respective plans and addons.
Learn more about the product families in Chargebee.
Create plans (services) offered to your customers and specify the billing period and pricing structure. You can choose from the following pricing models to create your prices:
Learn more about plans in Chargebee.
Additionally, If you want to charge your customers based on usage or consumption of these products and services, you can Select This plan is metered.
You will then be able to send usage data for each customer to Chargebee which will be used to compute the invoice value.
Learn more about Chargebee's metered billing feature.
Enhance your revenue streams with these optional features:
Addons: Suggest additional services or products to your customers during the subscription process.
Learn more about Addons.
Charges: Collect charges for one-time services or products, such as Onboarding, Dev Services, Support Services, and One-Time Events.
Learn more about Charges.
Coupons: Offer discounts to your customers by configuring percentage-based or fixed amount-based coupons, which can be applied to invoices or specific products. Set coupon validity as needed.
Learn more about Coupons.
You need to connect a Payment Gateway to Chargebee before you can start accepting payments.
Go to Settings > Configure Chargebee > Payment Gateways and configure the payment gateway.
Once the payment gateway is connected, enable or disable the payment methods that you would like to offer to your customers.
Chargebee supports both self-serve and sales-driven onboarding motions.
Follow the method that apply to your business.
If you have a self-serve onboarding motion for your business, you can easily embed Chargebee Checkout into your website.
You can integrate Chargebee Checkout in three different ways:
| Options |
Coding Required? |
Description |
|---|---|---|
| Payment Link | No code | Generate Payment Links to share with your customers via email or messaging. When customers access the payment link, safely enter their contact & payment information via Chargebee Checkout widget. Learn more about Payment Links. |
| Drop-in-script | Low code | Add a simple drop-in script to the Subscribe button on your website. When customers click on it, they can safely enter their contact & payment information via Chargebee Checkout widget. Learn more about drop-in script. |
| API based integration | Yes | Build your own Checkout using our APIs. Learn more about API-Based Integration. |
Empower your sales team to engage customers effectively and drive successful onboarding experiences.
| Options |
Description |
|---|---|
| Manual Customer Onboarding | Create Subscription via the Chargebee UI. While creating subscriptions, you can enter your customer details, add plans to the subscription, and send invoices to the customer. |
| Automated Customer Onboarding |
|
Set up Webhooks so that your application can be kept up to date on key events that happen in Chargebee, for example, a successful payment, subscription cancellation, and more. You can use this information to trigger feature provisioning or account cancellation on your application.
You can create up to five Webhooks.
To use Chargebee webhooks and events in your SaaS application, you'll need to follow these steps:
event_type field to identify the type of event. Example, subscription_created, invoice_paid,and more. Relevant Documentation:
Learn more about how to set up Chargebee webhooks for receiving real-time updates using this Tutorial.
Chargebee offers a range of customizable options for billing configurations, subscription management, and logic implementation.
| Option |
Description |
|---|---|
| Charge customers based on usage | If you want to charge your customers based on what they use, configure metered billing for your products. |
| Billing mode and proration | You can set up the billing mode for your site in Chargebee to control how your subscription billing functions. A change in the price of the subscription, prorated credits, and charges can be raised to ensure proper billing. Learn more to set up billing mode and proration. |
| Select a common billing date | With Chargebee's Calendar Billing feature, you can set the billing date for your customers, regardless of the date they sign up. Learn more about setting up a calendar billing feature. |
| Set up payment terms | Learn more to set up payment terms with your customer to collect your customer's outstanding invoices. Payment terms can be enabled for both offline and online payments if required. Note: Once enabled it cannot be disabled. |
| Combine charges into a single invoice | When your customer subscribes to multiple services and if the renewal date is the same for the subscriptions, instead of sending out multiple invoices, use consolidated invoicing from Chargebee to consolidate all invoices into one. Best practices - You can configure Calendar billing if you are enabling consolidated invoices such that all renewals fall on the same date. |
To better understand our billing settings and tailor them to your specific needs, we encourage you to explore our comprehensive resources.
Learn more about billing settings.
Test your integration fully, then start the transition to your Live Site.
Test your integration: Before you go live, test subscription scenarios to check that your integration works. You can use time machine feature from Chargebee to simulate subscription lifecycle events and see if everything works as expected.
Start go-live process: When you're ready to move from your sandbox account to your live account, follow the go-live checklist to walk through setting up your live account and switching your integration to work with live.
Depending on your specific business needs, you have the flexibility to configure one or more of the following features for streamlining your business and billing operations.
Give customers a consistent experience across touchpoints like invoices and emails with a look and feel that matches your brand.
Configure your brand elements by selecting Settings > Configure Chargebee > Brand Styles.
Learn more about Branding.
Chargebee has many supported languages that can be used for your customer-facing pages such as Checkout, portal, and emails.
Learn more about language capabilities by Chargebee.
Configure the invoices as per your business use case by navigating to Settings > Configure Chargebee > Customer Facing Essentials > Invoices, credit notes, and quotes > Invoices. You can access all your invoices in the Invoices tab.
Learn more about Invoices.
Create either a Refundable or Adjustable Credit Note, depending on the invoice status. To customize your credit notes, navigate to Settings > Configure Chargebee > Invoices, credit notes, and quotes > Credit Notes.
Learn more about Credit Notes.
Enable customers to access and effectively manage their accounts and subscriptions through the Chargebee-hosted customer portal.
Through the self-serve portal, customers can:
Learn more about the customer portal.
Chargebee enables you to configure emails that trigger at various stages of your customer's journey, including subscription actions, payments, invoices, and customer retention efforts.
Chargebee's email notifications to your customers fall into these key categories:
For each category, customize existing default email notifications or create tailored messages to suit your business needs.
Learn more about email notifications.
Configure taxes for regions where you will be collecting taxes from.
Learn more about Taxes.
When you process payments, transactions could get declined for various reasons starting from insufficient funds to expired cards or even connectivity issues. Chargebee's Dunning functionality retries payments automatically and sends reminders based on your Dunning Configuration.
Learn more about Dunning.
Chargebee Entitlements allow you to control what features of your products or services can be accessed by your customers based on the plan, addon, or charge they subscribe to.
Learn more about Chargebee Entitlements.
Utilize custom fields to capture extra customer or subscription details. After creation, these fields are adaptable for use on hosted checkout pages and invoices, accessible through the web interface and API.
Learn more about custom fields.
When you wish to connect with other third-party applications, we have native integrations with a number of applications that cover finance and CRM integrations, amongst many others which you can explore in our marketplace .