Glossary of Recharge terms

Get familiar with Recharge through the glossary of terms below. This glossary defines key terms you need to know as you build on the Recharge platform.

Addresses

The Addresses resource represents the destination a customer has chosen to ship their Recharge subscription or Onetime order. Subscriptions are tied to each customer address, and customers can have multiple addresses. There can be many subscriptions per address. To learn more see the Addresses.

Bulk Update

If you want to update many subscriptions at once, you would perform a bulk update. This process involves updating subscriptions that match your search criteria and updating them new information, using our tool. See the Knowledge Base for details.

Charge

A Charge is the representation of a the financial transaction linked to the purchase of an item (past or future). It can be a transaction that was processed already or the representation of an upcoming transaction. Completed charges will have an order associated with them. See Charges to learn more.

Checkout

The Checkout API resource contains all the information needed to add a customer, add their address, create a subscription and take payment from the customer. This resource is only available for Custom integrations.

Customer portal

This page is where customers can login and manage their subscription information. Recharge hosts this page in our out-of-the-box integration. It is possible to create your own customer portal using our APIs. Learn more about the customer portal in our Help Center.

Customers

The Customers API resource contains information about a shopper. The Customer record contains a unique email address, as no two customers in a store can have the same address. The Customer record also contains their unique Recharge ID, as well as the customer's ID on any external eCommerce platform. One Customer record can have many associated Address records. For more information, see Customers.

Discounts

The Discounts API resource on Recharge refers to any discounts set up in the Recharge Merchant Portal or via API. It does not refer to discounts on an external eCommerce platform.

Merchant portal

This is the Recharge admin dashboard. As an admin of the Recharge integration, you have access to all store settings on this page. The merchant portal is where you will set up a payment method, add a store currency, set up shipping and more. For details on specific settings, see Other Settings.

Onetime

A onetime in Recharge simply means a product a customer has selected to purchase only once, as opposed to in a recurring subscription cycle. In the Recharge Merchant Portal, you can choose whether or not to allow onetime purchases. To learn more about the Onetimes API resource, see this Article.

Order

The Order API resource contains information about a subscription, charge, customer and billing address tied together. Orders are created once a Charge is successfully processed.

Out-of-the-box

A feature on Recharge that works without special configuration or modification.

Purchase item

Purchase items represent a subscription purchase or a onetime purchase. Purchase items are always associated with an address.

Subscription Purchase Item
Subscription purchase items are recurring purchases. You can use the Subscriptions resource to add, remove or modify subscription purchase items.

Prepaid purchase items represent purchases where a single charge results in multiple orders. When a customer purchases a prepaid subscription, Recharge generates queued orders that represent the future remaining orders. You can identify a prepaid subscription purchase item by having a charge_interval_frequency that is greater than the order_interval_frequency.

Onetime purchase item
A onetime purchase is when a customer purchases a non-recurring item. They can appear alongside subscription purchase items. However, there are no future charges for onetime items. Onetimes can be added to future queued charges or on their own using the Onetimes resource.

Recharge Checkout

Sometimes styled as Recharge-hosted checkout, this means shoppers are directed to a version of checkout hosted on our servers. Customers of our out-of-the-box Shopify integration that signed up before November 2020 are using this version of Recharge. For information about getting started using this version of checkout, see Getting Started with the Recharge Checkout.

Recharge Payment Methods

Recharge Payment Methods (RCPM) provide customers additional flexibility by allowing multiple addresses to be linked to the same payment method. With Recharge Payment Methods, you can store multiple payment vehicles (credit/debit cards, an eWallet, PayPal, etc) for a single customer. The customer then chooses to associate one of the saved Payment Methods to each of their Addresses. To learn more about Recharge Payments, see Payments

Shopify Checkout

This version of checkout is hosted by Shopify. When customers checkout, they are redirected to a checkout page hosted by Shopify. Customers using our out-of-the-box Shopify integration who signed up for Recharge after November 2020 are using this checkout, with some exceptions. To learn more see our Shopify checkout integration early release status

Subscription widget

The "subscription widget" is the element on a page that displays the Recharge subscription options for a given product. You can configure the options customers have for subscription frequency, whether they can purchase the item as a onetime product, and more in the Merchant Portal. For details see Modifying the subscription widget.