I want to implement a pay as you go with Paypal, as I read the subscriptions API we need to create a plan and product, and as I understand it, it works based on the regular payments which obviously we don't want that we want if the user's budget is below a certain amount we recharge the user by a fixed amount again, can anybody guide me how to approach and implement pay as go using Paypal?
You are correct, subscriptions bill on a regular schedule whereas what you are describing is the ability to bill an arbitrary amount at any time.
That feature is called "reference transactions", or sometimes "billing agreements". It is not enabled for PayPal business accounts by default. To request the feature, the owner of the PayPal account should contact PayPal's general business support (note: not technical support) and explain the business need for this reference transactions feature.
If it's approved for the account, PayPal can then guide you on which API integration to use; potentially something like the newest v2/vault.
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For an e-commerce site I am building, for every transaction 90% needs to go to one account and 10% needs to go to another.
It looks as though Stripe can handle this using the 'Express' account using 'Connect', but it seems this account type is unavailable outside the US (we are based in Hong Kong).
It also looks like Paypal has 'Adaptive Payments' which would achieve the same result, but it says:
Important: Adaptive Payments is now a limited release product. It is restricted to select partners for approved use cases and should not be used for new integrations without guidance from PayPal.
As this is a very small website I don't want to go through the hassle of being a 'select partner' and they probably won't let me anyway. Is there any other way to achieve this?
If it makes any difference I will be using Drupal for the store.
Since adaptive payment is a limited release product, you may want to look at Braintree Marketplace. Basically, it works just like adaptive payment where you can split the payment. For availability, you will need to contact their sales team. For more information, refer this Braintree Marketplace
I need to create a subscriptions system in my app, where users can subscribe to a certain package and they must be billed monthly.
Moreover, I need to charge their credit card automatically, and without requiring them to have a PayPal account.
I read about https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/erp_overview, but is seems it's not available anymore as I click on sign up and it gives me an error ("Sorry, this feature is not available at this time.").
Then I've read about PayPal Standard Payments, which have a subscription method (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/subscribe_buttons/)
From what I can read there is that this is what is suitable for my use case, and it says that I need to enable the above mentioned service, which it doesn't work.
Can someone point me in the right direction on what service should I use from PayPal in order to implement recurring payments (basically my users will subscribe themselves to a service on my website, and I need to charge them monthly).
Thank you.
If you're wanting to handle credit cards directly I would highly recommend going with Payments Pro w/ Recurring Payments APIs.
You'll have to pay a monthly fee to get it all activated, and it's a little bit more expensive than what you were looking at, but it will give you much greater flexibility building your application(s) into various experiences for your buyers.
I'm going to offer my customers a selection of subscriptions to digital content. I want the customer to be able to add or delete subscriptions later, with as little hassle as possible.
It seems that if I use Paypal vault, I can collect the card information on the same subscriptions screen without multiple redirects and later change the monthly total without another checkout process or even customer sending approval to Paypal!
Does Paypal allow this? It seems too easy and also too permissive. Also, do I need to worry about PCI compliance?
Does anyone know a better way to do this (with or without Paypal)? I don't know how to use paypal recurring payments without a lengthy checkout if they ever change their subscriptions. Google wallet does not have subscription cancellation in their API! Several other alternatives only allow preset subscription amounts.
The CSC/CVV is missing from the examples here: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/store-a-credit-card/ which makes me think you cannot use the card at will. The customer is probably going to be asked for authorisation.
Normally your online payment provider needs to support recurring payments (installments, subscriptions). PayPal does, there's a specific API:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/installment_buttons/
For the customer it's one-off, then the card is billed, say, monthly.
We'd like to find a payment provider that lets us do something similar to Hailo, ie:
Users sign up and give us their credit card details/authorise us to charge their account. They only need to do this once.
In Hailo's case, users might take a cab journey at any time and be billed any amount (within reason). In our case, users might need a job done at any time, again with an invoice for an arbitrary amount.
So ideally we'd be able to charge users accounts at any time, for any amount, without further authorisation. This is possible because Hailo (and I believe Uber) have it implemented. However, I don't know if they use a third-party payment provider or rolled their own.
Something like BrainTree's recurring payments is close to what we want, but not exactly. We want to be able to bill at arbitrary times, not on a fixed schedule.
The best option we currently have is to use recurring billing, ie save invoices and then charge them all at once at the end of the month. This isn't ideal from a cashflow -perspective, though. Another option is to use GoCardless' variable billing, (you ask customers permission to bill up to £X per month), though from speaking to people it seems they'd be leary of that as it seems like an upfront commitment.
Can we do it our way? How do companies like Hailo and Uber do it?
We're in the UK, by the way.
In PayPal world - we call this kind of functionality as Reference Transactions - here are the 2 how-tos that would give you more info on how to implement reference transactions with PayPal accounts and direct credit cards:
Reference Transactions for PayPal users
Reference Transactions for Credit/Debit cards
You can also use our Preapproval functionality - which would give you delegated access to a PayPal account to make payments on behalf of them. Here is it's how-to.
Full disclosure, I work as a developer for Braintree.
Using Braintree you can create transactions at any time, not just on a recurring basis. In fact Uber is a Braintree customer. You would store the card in the Braintree vault and create a new transaction when you are ready to bill the customers credit card.
Braintree has recently announced an international expansion that will support merchants in the UK and other countries in the next few months.
From your description Authorize.net CIM will do the job - http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/cim/
It's PCI compliant and let you store your customer credit card details with them and return a token for the customer. Then you can use this token to charge customer credit card whenever you need. Also their recurring billing facility would let you charge a fixed recurring charge if needed - http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/automatedrecurringbilling/
DataCash will let you do this, amongst many, many other things. You just provide their 16-digit reference number in the XML rather than a card number.
(Note: I'm an ex-DataCash employee, and we use DataCash as a payment gateway at my current work.)
I am trying to use the Recurring payment API offered by PayPal.
I have a scenario which I am not able to address directly. It goes like this.
We have a website where we sell some services. Now the services are charged per user license. A user can buy/cancel user license in between. We want to offer the customer a recurring billing option. We have to notice here that the amount may vary each billing cycle based on the number of user licenses the customer uses during that cycle.
Is there any way I can achieve this using PayPal recurring Payment API's.
I realize this is a very old post, but it still shows up for Google searches, so I thought I'd add:
Paypal does allow you to do this now, using their new adaptive payments api.
Authorize.net also has a service that might work called Customer Information Manager.
The recurring payment option is a fixed amount that the customer pre-agrees to pay each month (or period). To do what you're trying to do, a customer would have to pre-agree to pay whatever amount you decide to charge at a later time. This means pre-authorizing an unknown payment amount, which will not be allowed by any payment service.
Your only options are:
Bill the variable amount each month (i.e. no subscription).
Set up a subscription where the monthly amount is the maximum that could potentially be billed, and then refund the difference each month.
Good luck with #2 - I would never agree to such a thing as a customer, personally.
What you're looking for is covered in the UK by the Direct Debit system, however given the potential for abuse it's very tightly controlled and there are a lot of restrictions and regulations governing it.
I'd strongly suggest you just set up a monthly invoicing system that just bills the client each month.
I don't know its meaning full or not as it is a very old post.
Instead of creating recurring profile on PayPal Server, You can store the customer's credit card on the PayPal using REST API: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#vault then every month you can fetch it and charge it like recurring Payment Or When client is no longer with the services then just remove its card from PayPal.
I suppose Authorize.net SIM method also does the same.
Hope this make sense.