Navigating Recurring Payments in India: A Backend Perspective - Shopify

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This post details the technical implementation of Shopify's billing platform to comply with new RBI regulations for recurring payments in India. It covers modeling the e-mandate concept, handling both recurring and one-time payments, integrating with card and UPI payment methods, and working with a new payment provider. Key technical challenges addressed include conceptualizing e-mandates within the existing source object model, managing AFA flows for different payment types to avoid user friction, implementing PCI-compliant card onboarding and subsequent payments (both below and above the RBI threshold), and handling UPI's asynchronous nature and transaction limit complexities by defining a minimum recurring transaction limit and a fallback for larger payments. The post includes sequence diagrams and ER diagrams to illustrate the backend perspective.