Types of Emails and SMS🔗

Razorpay sends emails and SMS to customers at 8 different stages during the life cycle of a Subscription.

Created

An email and SMS is sent when you create and send a new Subscription link to a customer to make the authentication payment. The authenticated amount depends on the upfront_amount for the Subscriptions.

Initialized

An email and SMS is sent after the customer successfully makes the authentication payment.

Charged Successfully

An email and SMS is sent when we make a successful automated charge on the Subscription as per the billing cycle.

Completed

An email and SMS is sent to the customer when the Subscription moves to the completed state. There is no notification sent if the Subscription moves to the same state. This is because the Subscription is already in the completed state, and a charge was made on an older invoice.

Charged Failed

An email and SMS is sent when a charge on a card fails. When an automated charge on a Subscription fails, we retry an auto-charge on the card. If the retries are not exhausted, the Subscription moves to the pending state. We send out a notification (email and SMS) every time the Subscription moves to the pending state. The email and SMS contains an Update Card option for the customer to change the card details associated with the Subscription.

Card Updated

An email and SMS is sent whenever a customer changes the card details associated with the Subscription. This notification notifies the customer that their new card details are now successfully updated.

Invoice Charge

An email and SMS is sent when a manual charge is made on an old Subscription invoice (either by you or the customer). If the Subscription was in the halted state, we also mention that the Subscription is now active, and we will resume the automated charges from the next cycle onwards in the notification.

Halted

When an automated charge on a Subscription fails, we retry an auto-charge on the card. When all the retries are exhausted, it moves to the halted state. We send out a notification (email and SMS) every time the Subscription moves to the halted state. These notifications contain the Update Card option to change the card linked to the Subscription.

Cancelled

An email and SMS is sent when the Subscription moves to the cancelled state. This happens because either you or your customer cancelled the Subscription.

Subscription Updated

An email and SMS is sent when the Subscription is successfully updated. There is no state change when a Subscription is updated.

Webhook Vs API🔗

APIs send you the data when you request it. For Webhooks, you do not need to make a request. You receive the data when it is available.

Example
If you need to know whether a payment link is paid or not, using APIs, you need to keep polling every few seconds until someone pays. However, if you are using Webhooks, you can configure a webhook event payment_link.paid to receive notifications when a customer makes the payment using the link.

Idempotency🔗

There could be scenarios where your endpoint might receive the same webhook event multiple times. This is an expected behaviour based on the webhook design.

To handle duplicate webhook events:

1. You can identify the duplicate webhooks using the x-razorpay-event-id header. The value for this header is unique per event.
2. Check the value of x-razorpay-event-id in the webhook request header.
3. Verify if an event with the same header is processed at your end.

Deactivation🔗

All webhook responses must return a status code in the range 2XX within a window of 5 seconds. If we receive response codes other than this or the request times out, it is considered a failure.

On failure, a webhook is re-tried at progressive intervals of time, defined in the exponential back-off policy, for 24 hours. If the failures continue for 24 hours, the webhook is disabled. You need to enable the webhook from the Razorpay Dashboard after fixing the errors at your end. Know more about enabling Webhooks.

Setup Webhooks🔗

Watch this video to see how to set up a webhook.

To set up webhooks:

1. Log into the Razorpay Dashboard and navigate to Settings → Webhooks.

2. Click the + Add New Webhook button.

   

3. In the Webhook Setup pop-up page:

   1. Enter the URL where you want to receive the webhook payload when an event is triggered. We recommended using an HTTPS URL. Handy Tips
      You can set up to 10 URLs to receive Webhook notifications. Webhooks can only be delivered to public URLs. If you attempt to save a localhost endpoint as part of a webhook setup, you will notice an error. Know more about testing Webhooks on an application running on localhost.
   2. Enter a Secret for the webhook endpoint. The secret is used to validate that the webhook is from Razorpay. Do not expose the secret publicly. Know more about how to validate webhooks. Handy Tips
      
      • When setting up the webhook, you will be asked to specify a secret. Using this secret, you can validate that the webhook is from Razorpay. Entering the secret is optional but recommended. The secret should never be exposed publicly.
      • The webhoook secret does not need to be the merchant secret key provided by Razorpay.
4. In the Alert Email field, enter the email address to which the notifications should be sent in case of webhook failure. You will receive webhook deactivation notifications to this email address.
5. Select the required events from the list of Active Events.

You can click Edit to make changes to the webhooks.

Available Events🔗

The table below lists the Webhook events available for Subscriptions.

Sample Payloads🔗

For sample payloads, refer to the Sample payload section in the API document.