Role in the Ecosystem

The Billing Service serves a dual purpose:

This page discusses other services and integrations necessary to harness this service’s capabilities.

For a broader view of the entire subscription ecosystem, see Subscriptions Ecosystem.

Figure 1. Context Diagram showing relationships with other services

Details of integrations' roles:

Cart Operations Service
- Kicks off the flow by creating an order from a checked-out cart
- Does not directly interface with Billing
Order Operations Service
- Creates subscriptions for orders that completed check out.
- CSRs manage the subscription along with the order’s lifecycle
Subscription Operations Service
- Manages complex state transitions, sandboxed modifications (edits, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations), locking mechanisms, and the calculation of prorated prices and estimated future payments.
- Operations performed in the Subscription Operations Service (like creating a new subscription or modifying an existing one) typically result in the generation of `BillingEvent`s which are then processed by the Billing Service’s scheduled jobs.
Payment Transaction Service
- Provides Saved Payment Methods to use for payments
- Executes AuthAndCapture requests for a subscription
- Executes Refund requests for a subscription
- Tip: Start exploring payment integrations here.
Tax Provider
- Calculates taxes for a payment
- Tip: To learn more about tax integration options, see the Tax page.
Catalog Service
- Provides SKU to Entitlement mapping to persist the effects of subscription changes onto Entitlements
Entitlement Service
- Grants and revokes entitlements based on subscription changes