给予条纹客户信用

Question

I'm working with Stripe. Our users subscribe to our service and they are billed every 2 weeks. We need to implement a way to give them $5 credit every time they refer someone to use our service.

Solutions I have considered so far:

• Stripe coupons: Stripe has great documentation. Unfortunately, for coupons there are many ambiguities. I tried working with coupons but so far it seems like a coupon can only be applied once for each invoice, and you can't apply multiple coupons for one invoice. This will not work with us since a user can earn $5 multiple times during the billing period.
• Issuing refund: the problem with this is that we have to pay the user actual money while what we actually want is to give them credit to use in our service.

Am I missing anything with coupons? Are there any other solutions/suggestions?

Answer 1

If I understand your use case correctly, I think the best way would be to create an invoice item with an amount of -500 for each referral. When you create an invoice item, by default it is set as "pending" and will automatically be included in the next invoice, ie at the end of the current billing period.

Be aware that if the invoice's total is negative (in the case of many referrals), then the total will be added to the customer's account_balance and reduce the amount of the next invoice as well. If this isn't what you want, you'd need to reset the customer's account_balance to zero, or make sure that you don't create invoice items that will make the invoice's total go below zero.

More information about invoice items can be found here: https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/guide#adding-invoice-items . The guide only mentions invoice items with positive values (ie additional charges), but you can use negative values as well.

Answer 2

Have you considered just checking for available credit in transactions before you charge?

That way you can just store how much credit people currently have in some database, and just apply the balance on transactions. AKA charge them for full_price - total_credits .