Introduction
The Autopay Payment Links feature provides a seamless way to onboard your customers for recurring payments directly from your PhonePe Business Dashboard. This solution operates on a hybrid model designed to simplify your workflow; you can create and share mandate setup links completely code-free from the dashboard, while handling the ongoing recurring payments (redemptions) using Standard API Integration.
How Redemption Works
While creating a mandate gives you the permission to automatically charge a customer, the mandate on its own does not automatically pull funds on a set schedule. Instead, you must actively trigger each payment when a billing cycle is due, a process known as redemption.
Whenever a customer’s payment is scheduled, your system will initiate the charge. Because of banking regulations, this is a multi-step process rather than a single trigger. You must first notify the customer about the upcoming deduction (pre-debit notification), wait for the required period, and then execute the actual debit. This gives you complete control over when and how much to charge your customers, accommodating variable billing, prorated charges, or tiered subscription plans while remaining fully compliant.
When you create these payment links, you have two distinct ways to handle the initial customer verification:
- Penny Drop (Default): The system securely verifies the customer’s bank account by deducting ₹2, which is immediately credited back during the setup process. The actual subscription amount is only deducted later when you trigger the first billing cycle.
- Transaction Flow: If you prefer to collect the first payment immediately, this flow debits the actual subscription amount from the customer’s account right as they set up the mandate. All future billing cycles are then handled via API.
What’s Next?
Now that you understand how the hybrid autopay method works, it’s time to put it into action. In the next section, we will walk you through how to configure this setup directly from your dashboard.
