2. What is a recurring contract?
A recurring contract is a set of one or more recurring payment details linked to a unique shopper on your merchant account. The
contract is identified using the shopperReference and merchantAccount fields which are specified as part of the payment session, for
Hosted Payment Pages (HPP) or the payment request for Direct API.
The recurring details each have a unique 16 digit reference number called the recurringDetailReference. A recurring detail reference
number can be used in place of the actual payment details to submit a payment to the system.
Please note, the default recurring behaviour is for recurring contracts to be established and used within a single merchant
account. However, your account can be configured to allow you to use stored details across all merchant accounts associated with
your company account. Please contact the Adyen Support Team (support@adyen.com) if you would like to have this feature
enabled on your account.
2.1. Recurring vs One-Click
One-Click functionality gives the shopper the option to store their payment details with the merchant, within the Adyen environment.
The shopper makes this choice during their first payment by checking a checkbox.
For card payments, One-Click differs from Recurring as follows:
• The shopper chooses whether their card data can be stored or not.
• For subsequent transactions, the shopper is always present and must supply their card's security code (CVC/CVV).
One-Click has the advantage of ensuring full card authorisation takes place for each payment, including card security code checks
and 3D secure, if applicable, with the potential disadvantage that the shopper must be present for all payments.
2.2. Standard workflow
The usual workflow is as follows:
1. Create your recurring contract by performing an initial Payment with the additional fields defined in section 3, ensuring that
you store the shopperEmail, shopperReference, and the recurringContract fields in your system for later use.
If you receive a successful AUTHORISATION notification for the payment then you know the recurring contract has been
created. You do not receive the recurringDetailReference at this time and need do nothing more in our system.
2. When you're ready to process a subsequent payment, set the value of the selectedRecurringDetailReference to either:
1. The recurringDetailReference returned from the list of all stored recurring details based on the shopperReference
provided in step 1.
2. The word “LATEST”, which uses the most recently stored recurring detail.
Set other fields as per section 5, taking into account the recurringContract value that was set in step 1.
If the subsequent payment is successful you will receive an AUTHORISATION notification with success=”true”.
Please refer to section 8 for the list of supported payment methods.
Please refer to Appendix B for sample requests & responses for an entire workflow.
