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Customer Portal

Overview​

The customer portal allows your customers to view a few different things like

  • View their current and past invoices
  • Make payments against open invoices
  • View their balance
  • View their current and past payments
  • Update their payment information

The Customer Portal can also be extended and customized - embed your own logo, your own contact information, change colors via developer-friendly CSS/stylesheet overrides, and more.

Enable the Customer Portal​

  1. Go to your Settings, then click Add-Ons and More Add-Ons
  1. Find Customer Portal and click Get Started
  1. Set "Enable the Customer Portal?" to "Yes"

You will now see the URL for your customer portal and have the option to specify what information is displayed to customers in their accounts.

Customers log in to the customer portal using their email address (the email address you see in ChargeOver) and a password.

Set a Customer's Password​

There are a two different options to set a customer's password. You can either set the password for them, by editing their contact and changing the password blank that is there to something easy like 1234.

Or, once they have the customer portal URL, you can direct them to click "Don't have an account? Get one!" button on the customer portal login page.

note

If the contacts username for the customer portal is already taken, you might see an added letter onto the end of the contacts email. Example: 1234@gmail.comt We do this to ensure every customer has a different username and there are no duplicates.

Allow Another User or Contact Log into the Customer Portal​

Each customer in ChargeOver can have zero or more logins to the Customer Portal. The Customer Portal allows your customers to log in and view their invoice and payment history, update payment information, and more.

Steps​

  1. Find the customer in ChargeOver
  1. Click the Contacts tab for the customer

  1. Click the New Contact button to create a new contact

  1. Enter the contact or user's details. You will need to have the customers email address entered into their contact information before they can succesfully login using your customer portal link.

    Make sure you provide an email address, as they will only be able to log-in using the email address that you have on file!

How Do Customers Log-In?​

You can direct customers to your ChargeOver URL to log in. For example, you might have something like

https://your-company-name.chargeover.com

From that page, customers can either log in with their email address and password (if they have one), or if they haven't created an account yet, they can click the Don't have an account button.

The customer will be asked for their email address. They must use the email address that you have entered into ChargeOver.

The customer will be walked through setting a password.

There are password requirements the customer will need to adhere to a few things

  • Minimum of 6 Characters
  • Must include 1 number
  • Must include 1 special character

Immediately after setting a password, the customer will be able to login and view their account history / invoice and payment history / etc.

For most invoices, customers can view the invoice without logging in to the portal. You can email them a link to their invoice, email them a statement, or send them a PDF copy with no issues.

However, there are two exceptions to this rule, where the customer will be required to login into their customer portal.

  1. The customer's invoice is paid, and is more than 365 days old
  2. ChargeOver Support has enabled a specific, hidden setting to require login to view invoices. This setting makes the customer log in to the portal to view any of their invoices. Please contact us if you would like us to enable that setting for you.

These rules are in place so that we don't just leave thousands and thousands of publicly available invoice URLs out on the web that a potential bot could randomly guess the links for and harvest data from. We have some rate limiting, etc. in place to avoid this, but the less that's publicly exposed, the better.

How can a customer view their invoices?​

  1. Your customer can log in to the customer portal, in which case they can see all their old invoices
  1. You (the merchant) can email them the PDF of the invoice. You'll need to attach the actual PDF file and not use the link to the PDF

Create Single Sign-On (SSO) for Your Customer Portal​

We support single sign-on for customers through the customer portal. This is helpful if you want to provide a customer with a one-time use URL so that they can log into their customer portal immediately.

Sometimes customers need to be able to access their billing portal right away. Maybe they need to make a payment or want to see the statements they have had so far, either way, SSO can make this process seamless for them.

Steps​

  1. Go to this link to create your SSO following the directions: https://developer.chargeover.com/apidocs/rest/#login-a-user
  1. From there you can make an API call from within your Instance
  1. ChargeOver then returns a unique one-time use login URL
  1. You can send that URL to the customer of your choice
  1. Then the customer is automatically logged into their customer billing portal

Allow Customers to Cancel Their Subscriptions​

In Customer Portal settings, select Yes for both options:

  • "Show the "My Subscriptions" tab in the customer portal?"
  • "Allow customers to cancel their subscriptions?"

What Customers Will See​

If cancel reasons are enabled for Customer Portal​

If there are no cancel reasons are enabled for Customer Portal​

note

You will need to enable or create cancel reasons for the Customer Portal through the Cancel Reasons in Add-Ons

If no cancel reasons are made available in the Customer Portal, no cancel reason will be collected.

We recommended you should create or use an 'unknown or unspecified' reason if you plan to collect cancellation reasons from the customer.

Customize Your Customer Portal​

We support the ability to customize the CSS on your customer portal. This is helpful if you want to customize your portal to be more in line with your branding!

Add CSS to Your Portal​

  1. Navigate to Settings then Add-Ons Search for Hosted Sign-Up Pages
  1. Choose the Options tab

  1. In the "Your own CSS to embed" box, you can enter CSS styling.
  1. Save your changes

CSS example​

body {
   background-image: linear-gradient(orange, blue);
}

Multiple Contacts and the Customer Portal​

There are cases where a single email address may be attached to more than one contact, on more than one customer in a single ChargeOver instance.

In this case, if the contact uses their email address to log in to the customer portal, they will only be able to log in to one of the customer's accounts.

Instead, they can use their username (viewable in the ChargeOver admin UI on the contact) to log in to each one separately.

Allow Customers to Cancel Their Subscriptions​

In Customer Portal settings, select Yes for both:

Show the "My Subscriptions" tab in the customer portal? and Allow customers to cancel their subscriptions? options.

What Customers Will See​

If cancel reasons are enabled for Customer Portal​

If there are no cancel reasons enabled for Customer Portal​

note

You will need to enable and create cancel reasons for the Customer Portal through the Cancel Reasons in Add-ons

If no cancel reasons are made available in the Customer Portal, no cancel reason will be collected.

It is recommended you create an 'unknown or unspecified' reason if you plan to collect cancellation reasons from customers.

Embedding the Customer Portal in an iframe​

You can embed ChargeOver's customer portal into your own site, via an <iframe>.

The HTML code looks like this:

<iframe width="100%" height="800" src="https://your-chargeover-website-here.chargeover.com">
</iframe>

If you see a message indicating the page cannot be displayed (possibly due to security protections), make sure you whitelist the domain name your <iframe> is hosted on.