Customers

What is a Customer?

Recharge creates a Customer record when a customer checks out on an e-commerce storefront with a Recharge subscription.

The Customer object contains key information such as:

• The customer's Recharge id
• Billing information
• The external id associated with the customer on an e-commerce platform

The Customer record changes when either a merchant updates the Customer information or when the customer themselves edit their information in the Recharge Customer Portal.

You may need to interact with the Customer object when, for example, a customer adds a new payment method to their account on an external e-commerce store or changes their billing information.

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Note

Creating a customer within Recharge will not create a customer record within an external e-commerce platform at this time.

Customers and Addresses

The Addresses endpoint is a child of the Customer object. Customers can have many addresses associated with their account. Addresses cannot be associated with multiple customers.

The address nested under a customer resource is the customer's billing address associated with their payment method. It is not the address associated with delivery of a subscription. For the subscription shipping address, see Subscriptions.

Customer payment method

Update the customer object to add or update a customer's payment method. Recharge doesn't accept payment information directly. You should send a tokenized customer representation from the payment processor to add or update the payment method. When using Stripe as your payment processor, the customer token should begin with the prefix cus, not tok.

Customer FAQ

How to define and detect a churned customer?

You can use webhook customer/deactivated to get information about customers (whether they are active or inactive). Customer is churned when his status is set to inactive and that happens when:

1. Customer cancels subscription or subscription expires (if that’s the only subscription the customer had) and the subscription parameter cancelled_at will be shown, but if he has some other subscriptions with pending charges, he will remain active.
2. Max number of retries is reached on a charge and the store admin closes it out
3. Something is auto-cancelled (number_of_charges_before_expiration is reached).

Calculating churn can be pretty difficult. Recharge Analytics allows you to gain granular insight in your churn metrics and cohort retention.