>>>>>> NOTE: Check out Part 1 FAQs here! <<<<<<
This month we edited and updated the answers to the most frequently asked questions about Kill Bill’s features. (Last month we did the same for the more general FAQs.)
Believe it or not, we’re still working on the FAQs… adding more to it and reorganizing it amongst a larger pool of categories. This work-in-progress is available on the (where else? ) FAQs page on our website.
Does Kill Bill support recurring billing / usage billing / one-time billing?
Kill Bill supports recurring billing, usage billing, and one-time transactions. (See our Usage documentation to understand the various types of usage Kill Bill supports.)
How does Kill Bill handle payments?
Kill Bill is not a payment gateway. Instead, when a payment is triggered in Kill Bill, it connects to a payment gateway, which in turn handles the payment details and processing. (For more information on payments, see our Payment Guide.)
Connection to a payment gateway is achieved through plugins. We have some open-source payment plugins, but depending on your payment gateway, you may need to write your own plugin.
Note: If your organization or development team needs help writing a plugin, we can recommend partners that have created them before for Kill Bill users. Check out one of our partners here.
What payment gateways can I use with Kill Bill?
Kill Bill is a generic platform to build billing and payment infrastructures. As such, it is agnostic of payment gateways.
Kill Bill communicates to payment gateways via plugins. Thus, there are virtually no restrictions on what payment gateway you can use. See our Payment Guide for more information.
What types of payment methods does Kill Bill support?
Kill Bill supports all the credit and debit cards your payment gateway supports. If your payment gateway supports ACH, then you can use Kill Bill to accept ACH, too!
Additionally, with Kill Bill, you can track external payments (such as checks, cash, and even Boleto Bancário). When you receive the money, simply let Kill Bill know about it (either via Kaui, our administrative UI or our APIs).
How does Kill Bill support international billing?
We designed the core of the billing platform to be internationalized. The catalog module has support for all currencies, including crypto-currencies (e.g. Bitcoin). The invoice module will understand these various currencies and respect localization rules. (For example, it will correctly round US dollars to two decimal places but Japanese Yen amounts will have no decimal portion.)
Accounts can have a designated locale (for example, $1,234.99 will be displayed as 1.234,99 $ for accounts with the French Canada locale) and a time zone (to generate invoices in their time zone instead of the merchant’s).
From a payment perspective, Kill Bill supports payment gateways via plugins. If your international gateway isn’t supported yet, you can simply write a plugin for it. All of Active Merchant processors for instance can be handled.
Does Kill Bill include catalog functionality?
Kill Bill includes an XML catalog that supports these features (and more):
- Real-time catalog with subscription plans and one-off products
- Product tiers
- Pricing lists
- Different subscription types (main subscription, add-on subscriptions, etc.)
For more catalog information, see the Catalog section of our documentation.
If you have a very large catalog (e.g., thousands of products) and/or if it is highly dynamic, maintaining the catalog as an XML file may not be practical. Instead, you can use the CatalogPluginApi to write a plugin that would provide an alternative catalog implementation (such as integrating with your existing catalog system). See the documentation.
Here are Java and Ruby examples.
Does Kill Bill support coupons and/or discounts?
There are several ways to handle coupons and discounts:
- The simplest option is for your catalog to include discount plans (plans can additionally include discount phases)
- An alternative is to use the
PhasePriceOverrideelement when creating a subscription - Finally, to implement a fully fledged coupon functionality, use the EntitlementPluginApi to write your custom plugin (here is an example)
For more details, check this blog post.
Can Kill Bill send my customers email notifications about payments that are due?
The email notifications plugin lets you send emails to your customers regarding upcoming invoices, payment successes and failures, subscription cancellations, etc.
Can I use Kill Bill to accept cryptocurrency payments from my customers?
You can certainly do this; you’ll need to write a plugin to communicate with a payment gateway that supports different cryptocurrency coins (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum).
Note: If your organization or development team needs help writing a plugin, we can recommend partners that have created them before for Kill Bill users. Check out one of our partners here.
Where can I see a full list of Kill Bill features?
Visit the Features page on our website.
Psst! Check out the Part 1 FAQs here!
