Moving from Chargebee to Stripe?
If you want to migrate your active Chargebee subscriptions over to Stripe, this step by step guide will show you how!
Is it safe to migrate LIVE subscriptions from Chargeable to Stripe?
It’s absolutely safe to migrate your active subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe if you carefully follow the process detailed in this article.
Or, if you don’t feel secure doing it yourself, we’ll be happy to do it all for you, just get in touch. 🙂
Why move from Chargebee to Stripe?
Chargebee is a great service.
But in the case of one of our customers, he felt that Stripe was a better solution for his needs and asked us to migrate his subscriptions over without interrupting his members’ service.
So we did, and we documented the process for you to use. 🙂
What you need for this guide
1 – Chargebee – this is the payment gateway you’re moving FROM
2 – Google Sheets or Excel – we’ll use a spreadsheet to import subscription data from Chargebee and properly organize it before importing it to Stripe.
3 – Stripe – the payment gateway you’re moving TO
Chargebee to Stripe migration process
Below is the step-by-step process for moving your active subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe, make sure to follow it carefully! 🙂
1 – Export your subscriptions from Chargebee
1.1 – Go to your Chargebee Dashboard => Subscriptions
1.2 – Select the active and non-renewing subscription from the filter list
Note: you generally want a clean import to your new payment processor, so there’s usually no need to import the cancelled subscriptions, although you may choose to do so if you want the historical data for your reference.
1.3 – Click on Export
2 – Formatting Chargebee subscriptions with Google Sheets
In this step we will use Google Sheets to store and organize the subscription data that we exported from Chargebee.
2.1 – Import your file
You can open a file directly from the computer by pressing command+o on Mac or CTRL+o on Windows or just by following this path: File => Import => Upload.
Now you need to remove any non-renewing subscriptions.
2.2 – Filter by column “Status” and select “Non-renewing”.
2.3 – Copy the data into a new Google Sheets file and delete it from the original one.
You’re doing this step because you’ll manually add the subscriptions that don't rebill directly in your membership plugin.
Since these members are not renewing their subscriptions there’s no need to import their data to Stripe (although, as mentioned, you can still choose to do so just to have your historical data in one place).
Now the file is ready for migration.
3 – Recreate your Chargebee products in Stripe
A full list of the products from Chargebee can be found by following this path: Chargebee Dashboard => Product catalog => Plans
3.1 – Go to Stripe Dashboard => Products
3.2 – Click on create new product
3.3 – Fill in the required information
In order to create a product, you will need to complete a few important details about it:
Name – the name of the product
Price – the price of the product and the type of the plan ( one time or recurring )
Billing period – how many days, weeks, until the next payment.
3.4 – Repeat the same process for every product that you have.
4 – Recreate coupons that are applied in Chargebee (optional)
In this optional step, you may want to recreate your Chargebee coupons in Stripe so you can continue using them with Stripe.
4.1 – Go to Stripe Dashboard => Products => Coupons
4.2 – Click on create new coupon
4.3 – Fill in the required information
In order to create the coupons, you will need to complete the following:
Name – The name of the coupon
Type – choose the type of the coupon, you have two options:
– Percentage discount
– Flat amount discount
Apply to the selected product(s) – Apply the Coupon to the desired product.
Duration of the coupon – You have 3 options here:
– forever
– once
– multiple months
5 – Recreate the subscriptions in Stripe
Unfortunately, Stripe doesn’t let you simply import the subscriptions data file that you exported earlier from Chargebee.
So this part is a manual process.
If you have lots and lots of subscriptions it could possibly be automated using a script or Zapier.
However, the easiest solution is to delegate this work to an inexpensive Virtual Assistant (which is what we did).
5.1 – Go to Stripe Dashboard => Customers => Subscriptions
5.2 – Click on create new subscription
5.3 – Add the information from the file that we have exported.
Fill in the customer name (search after email address); if the customer doesn’t exist in Stripe, you just click on Add new customer and complete the name and email address fields (these are mandatory fields).
NOTE: If the customer doesn’t exist and is created manually (like in the above-mentioned situation), the customer will need to update his credit card on your website.
5.4 – Fill in the product name: here you will need to choose what product will the customer have
5.5 – After you select the product, you will want to add a trial for the remaining period of the subscription;
For example, if a customer has already been re-billed for his monthly subscription on the 14th of December, and you update the subscription in Stripe on the 20th of December, you will need to add a free trial period to account for the remaining days between 20 December and 14 January.
If you don’t add this free trial, then the customer will immediately be charged again, which you obviously don’t want.
5.6 – Payment method: the default payment method is set to automatic payments; if you want to manually send invoices to the customer, select “Email invoice to the customer to pay manually”.
5.7 – Repeat the process until you migrate all of the subscriptions from ChargeBee to Stripe.
Note: The email address and the next payment date values come from the file that we exported from Chargebee.
In this example, they are in column I and column S, with the headings – subscriptions.current_term_end and column S – Customers.email, respectively.
5.8 – Congratulations, you're all done!
If you have any questions or need any help just leave a comment or get in touch. 🙂
