A recurring charge to the customer’s card is the technical foundation of any product subscription. Without it, all you have left is a “time to order again” reminder — and that is not a subscription. Here is what is available to a Ukrainian store, and where things most often go wrong.
How it works
A recurring payment consists of two distinct operations, and they should not be conflated.
The first payment. The customer pays the usual way — enters the card, passes 3-D Secure, confirms the amount. Along with the payment they consent to recurring charges. The payment provider returns a token to the store: an anonymised reference to the card from which the number cannot be recovered.
Subsequent charges. The store initiates the payment with the token. The customer takes no part: no card details, no confirmation. That is exactly why consent at the first step is mandatory, and why payment providers insist the customer can cancel without obstacles.
The practical consequence of tokenisation is that card details are never stored by you at all. That removes the heaviest part of the PCI DSS requirements — the part about storing card data.
What is available in Ukraine
Plata by Mono (MonoPay). Acquiring by monobank. Supports tokenisation and recurring charges, and onboards quickly for sole traders and companies alike. The documentation is short and clear.
LiqPay. Acquiring by PrivatBank, running since 2008. It has a dedicated mechanism for subscriptions and recurring charges on a schedule, thorough documentation and ready modules for the popular CMSs. Funds reach the merchant account within one banking day.
Both providers enable recurring payment support under your existing contract — no new legal entity or separate account is required. That is precisely the thing to confirm with your account manager before launch.
Where it all breaks: failed charges
The first charge is easy. The hard part starts when a payment fails — and payments will fail regularly.
The usual causes: insufficient funds, an expired card, a bank limit on unattended transactions, a reissued card. This is not a malfunction but the normal background of running subscriptions: in mature subscription services, failed attempts run to a few percent of all charges every month.
What matters is what you do next. Cancelling the subscription on the first decline loses you customers who were not going anywhere — their card had simply expired. A working scheme looks like this:
- The charge failed — leave the subscription alone.
- Notify the customer with a direct link to update the card in their dashboard.
- Retry in two or three days, then once more a few days later.
- Only after several failed attempts and silence should the subscription move to paused — not cancelled.
This logic is not an implementation detail. It is the main reason an in-house billing system costs more than it looks like it will at the start.
What payment providers require
Recurring charges attract close attention from both banks and card schemes. The requirements come down to transparency:
- the customer must explicitly consent to recurring charges, not have them defaulted on;
- they must see the amount and the interval before the first payment;
- they must be able to cancel quickly and by themselves;
- a change of amount or frequency requires its own notification.
In practice that means a buyer dashboard is not a nice-to-have but part of the requirements. A store where the only way to cancel is an email to support will eventually hear from its acquirer — and before that, from a wave of chargebacks.
What it costs to build yourself
A minimal, honest list of what has to be written and then maintained:
- storing tokens and binding them to subscriptions;
- a scheduler that initiates charges on the right day;
- retry logic with delays and a limit;
- customer notifications for every scenario;
- the dashboard: pause, skip, change frequency and product, update card, cancel;
- turning a successful charge into an order and a waybill;
- reconciliation: charged, refunded, pending.
Each item is simple on its own. Together they are several months of work and permanent maintenance — and none of it moves you closer to selling more product.
The ready-made option
Neocarts takes on exactly this part: recurring payments through Plata by Mono and LiqPay, the charge schedule, the retries, the buyer dashboard, and delivery with Nova Poshta. The money goes straight to your account — we are not an intermediary in the payment.
The fee is 5% of successful transactions, with no monthly charge and no setup cost. The terms are laid out in full on the pricing page.