What does the Retain Card Information setting do in Chargebee?

Introduction

When you're using multiple payment gateways in Chargebee and decide to update your smart routing rules, it's important to understand how card vaulting works, especially for existing customers. The Retain Card Information setting plays a key role in determining where an updated card is stored and how future payments are routed.

Let's start by discussing how Smart Routing affects card vaulting before we examine how the Retain Card Information setting influences updated payment methods.

What happens when you update a Smart Routing rule?

Updating a smart routing rule to direct payments to a new gateway changes how payment methods are stored and used for different types of customers.

• New customers: The payment methods of all new customers will be stored in the new gateway, and their payments will be processed through that gateway. Going forward, all future recurring payments for these customers will be routed to the new gateway.
• Existing customers: Payments for existing customers will continue to be processed through the original gateway, as their cards have already been vaulted there. Their recurring payments will remain on the original gateway until their payment method is updated.

What is the Retain Card Information' setting?

This setting allows you to control whether updated cards for existing customers should remain in their original gateway or move to the one defined by your latest smart routing rule.

How it works:

• Enable Retain Card Information: This ensures existing customers' cards are updated, vaulted, and processed in the original gateway. Their future payments will continue to be processed in the same gateway.
• Disable Retain Card Information: This will move the card and all future payments to the newly configured gateway in the smart routing rule when a customer updates their payment method, even if the card was originally vaulted in a different gateway.

What happens when a customer updates their card?

When an existing customer updates their card, Chargebee uses the Retain Card Information setting to determine where the new card will be stored and processed from.

Let's say you've updated your smart routing rules to route card payment methods through Braintree instead of Stripe. Here's how it will work:

• New customers: Their payment methods will be routed through Braintree, as per the updated smart routing rules.
• Existing customers: Their cards will remain vaulted in Stripe (where they were initially stored) and continue to be processed there unless updated. When an existing customer updates their card, the Retain Card Information setting determines where the updated card gets vaulted:
  • If enabled in Stripe (original gateway): The updated card will be vaulted and processed in Stripe.
  • If disabled in Stripe (original gateway): The updated card will be vaulted and processed in Braintree (new gateway).

Where can I view or change this setting?

Follow these steps to view or modify the Retain Card Information setting in your Chargebee site:

1. Log in to your Chargebee Billing site.
2. Go to Settings > Configure Chargebee > Payment Gateways.
3. Select the gateway you want to update the settings for.
4. Click Manage under the Cards section.
5. Enable or disable “Always retain card information in <gateway name> when customer updates it” and click Save.
6. Click Apply to publish the changes.