The Stripe Customer Portal is very useful for managing customer subscriptions like Upgrade, Downgrade, and Renew.

Customers can review their invoices directly and also check their history.

Portal billing setting

Do login into your stripe account

Navigate to the portal settings to configure the portal, and do below billing settings

Create Product

First of all, we need to create products. Follow the below process for creating products.

Click on the “Products” menu from the sidebar and click on the “Add Product” button on the top right corner of the products page and create a product.

Here is an example of how to create a product.

Create two or three products as shown below.

Select product In portal settings

If you want to allow your customer to change their subscription by an upgrade, downgrade, cancel or renew you need to set products in your portal setting.

Now navigate to customer portal settings again, in the Products section, you will find a dropdown “Find or add a product..”, click on it you will find the plan you have added, select the price of this product.

Don’t forget to save all these settings.

Then do the setup of your business information, also do branding settings in the “Appearance” section, and save it.

Once you are done with settings, you can preview the customer portal by clicking the Preview button beside the save button.

This will launch a preview of the portal so you can see how customers will use it for managing their subscriptions and billing details.

Integrate into Laravel

• Get you API keys
  • Go to “Developers > API keys” here you will find your “Publishable key” and “Secret key

• Create customer using stripe dashboard or by API
  • Create customer by Stripe API.
  • First of all, you’ll need to set your stripe secret key. For development mode, you can use test mode keys, but for production, you need to use your live mode keys

\Stripe\Stripe::setApiKey('sk_test_YOUR_KEY');
$customer = \Stripe\Customer::create([undefined]);

• Once you create a customer using stripe API, now you can create a billing session for that customer using stripe API.
  • Create a billing session of the customer by API

\Stripe\Stripe::setApiKey('sk_test_YOUR_KEY'); 
\Stripe\BillingPortal\Session::create([    
      'customer'   => 'cus_HnKDAQNjBniyFh',    
      'return_url' => 'https://example.com/subscription'
]);

You’ll get a response, like the below object:

{
  "id": "pts_c5cfgf8gjfgf73m5748g6",
  "object"    : "billing_portal.session",
  "created"   : 453543534,   
  "customer"  : "cus_bGFsnjJDcSiJu",   
  "livemode"  : false,   
  "return_url": "https://example.com/subscription" 
}

In the response body, there is a URL attribute:

Now redirect your customer to this URL immediately. For security purposes, this URL will expire in a few minutes.

After redirecting the customer to this URL, the portal will open and customers can manage their subscriptions and billing details in the portal. customers can return to the app by clicking the Return link on your company’s name or logo within the portal on the left side. They’ll redirect to the return_url you have provided at the time of creating the session or redirect URL set in your portal settings.

Listen to Webhooks

You must have a question, what is this Webhook!!!

It’s just an event, which will fire when a customer does any changes in his/her subscription in the portal, we can listen to this event in our app and make appropriate changes.

For example,

If a customer cancels his/her subscription in the portal, then how we will know about it!!

For it, when customers do any changes in his/her subscription

“customer.subscription.updated” event will be fired and we can listen for this event and, get to know the customer has changed subscription so we need to do appropriate changes in our app also.

Set webhook in your app

In the webhooks.php (in routes folder) file set up a route to handle webhook.

You can use the Laravel Cashier Package (https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/billing)to handle webhooks.

To set up a webhook for your portal navigate to the “Developers > Webhooks” menu you will find the below screen, here I have added a webhook to handle subscription cancel and update events, it will fire when customers update subscription, and you will receive it.

Click on the “Add endpoint” button and the below pop up will open. In Endpoint URL set the route you have created in the webhooks.php file. Select subscription updated and deleted events.

All done.

For more details, you can use stripe customer portal integration