I offer a service 2 times a year. Some of my clients desire to make payments rather than pay in one lump sum. They need to choose the amount they desire to pay and when they (date) they want to pay on. I just need PayPal for the processing and also the tracking for the amount they have paid. It also needs to not accept any more funds once they have reached the set amount.
Has anyone heard of this capability?
You time and consideration.
Have a look at https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/products/paypal-payments-pro/
They implement payment by instalments on their end with Paypal Credit. I believe you will still receive the entire payment in one go, but the customer will have to pay it off to Paypal directly. Alternatively, you may be able to hack something with recurring payment, though you would need to cancel it once the total amount has been reached; it's definitely not meant for that.
Regardless, you are probably better off contacting paypal support for this, since this isn't really a programming specific question.
Related
I am setting up the Paypal integration for a Clients website. He has a page where users can buy stuff that others users sell and he wants the buyers to pay using Paypal, he also wants the payment to be charged a fee, so that a percentage of the payment goes to the website owner and the remainder goes to the seller. For example:
Tom sells shirts at $20 each and i want to buy two, so i would pay $40 plus the 3% of the transaction, that would sum up to $41.2, $40 would go to Tom and $1.2 to the page owner.
How can i do this using Paypal? I have been reading a lot Smart Payments Button describes how to set a payment but the funds go to a single person, i need to set a chained payment, split payment or something alike and their docs seem very fuzzy.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks!
platform_fees , documented here , is the analogue to chained payments. However, it is only available to PayPal partners -- i.e., probably not your client.
For separate transaction payments to more than one receiver account, there is multi-seller payments.
After completing the Paypal Integration and after tears and pain i can tell that i couldn't use platform_fees.
The implementation is complete and working but i wrote to customer support and to dev support and they just don't want you to use platform_fees so nothing will work along that path.
The solution they provide and the one they want you to use is getting all the money on your account and then splitting it using Payouts to all the clients.
Really bad solution imo but its convenient for them because they charge more transactions instead of allowing you to do everything on a single transaction.
Is there a way to programmatically deny (or "unclaim") a direct PayPal payment?
Let's say someone sends ten payments of $1 each to a corporate account. This is already an accounting headache, but if you think you can refund them as they never happened, there's a non-refundable part of a commission. Ten payments will cost you $3 USD or about as much in other currencies no matter what. This is infinitesimal amount business-wise, but related accounting expenses can be ten or even hundred times as much depending on which country a business in.
So best case would be to reject such payments before they even happen.
I read about IPN notifications, but nowhere there's mentioned a possibility to respond to a specific payment event with some sort of refusal. Yet I saw sometimes my own payments made by using standard "Pay Now" buttons to some merchants were tagged as Unclaimed until a manual intervention from the merchant. Therefore there must a be a way to do this.
I need someone to point me in the right direction of what is the best Paypal product to use and the associated functions I need to accomplish my project.
I have a site where a user can signup for a internet phone service with a set monthly fee, lets say $200 for 1000 minutes.
The problem I have is that:
1. The first month is pro-rated so the amount may change.
2. If a user of my site goes over their allotted minutes I will charge them an overage fee in their next billing cycle, so the recurring payment may be different also.
From what I read I need to use adaptive payments is this correct, what functions should I use for creating, capturing and receiving payments.
Please help, I'm really in a bind.
There are many products that will do this. Avoid searching for "Recurring Payments" as that is generally used to refer to specific, relatively fixed payment schedules (like subscriptions) that you set up once with the payment partner (PayPal) and they execute the payments on that schedule for you. These schedules can be configured somewhat flexibly (e.g. free or reduced initial payment) but require that you can state the schedule & amounts in advance.
If you have more variable needs to collect payments from your users then you generally manage the timing and amount of the payments yourself; then you just need a mechanism for billing the user, ie a billing agreement.
PayPal products that support some form of billing agreements include PayPal Reference Transactions, PayPal Adaptive Payments, and the PayPal RESTful Payments suite.
Getting into opinion territory here, but of these three I would recommend either Reference Transaction (as the longest-standing, most mature and widely used solution) or the RESTful payments suite (as the latest and greatest solution) over Adaptive.
I have a bit of experience setting up online payment systems that accept credit card numbers and then pass them over to a gateway for a one time payment.
However, I now need to setup a system that can handle automatic recurring billing - where a user provides their credit card number and is automatically billed on a monthly basis from that point forward.
I am wondering what the best way to approach something like this is? (I notice that Paypal Payflow Pro does have a recurring billing feature, but I am a bit unclear on how it works.)
Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing? If possible, I would greatly prefer to avoid keeping a local record of credit card numbers for repeat processing.
Thanks (in advance) for your help.
There's a midpoint between building your own recurring billing and Auth.net's ARB or PayPal's recurring billing (both of which have their disadvantages). There are a number of providers that handle all the details and complexities of recurring billing, and simply report the charges to your payment gateway for processing at the interval you determine.
The most critical piece to look at is which services to credit card tokenization and support credit card data portability - this will ensure that your customer data isn't locked in with a billing provider and that you can take it with you if you choose another provider in the future. This also means that these providers store the customer credit card data for you, so you can greatly reduce your PCI compliance.
Take a look at Recurly (Disclaimer: I manage their customer and technical support) and Braintree. Both services will handle your recurring billing, credit card tokenization, and support credit card data portability.
Recurring billing is easy to handle and offload to a third party if your recurring amount is constant (e.g. the amount a user pays never changes in amount or frequency). Services like Authorize.Net's Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) and Paypal Payflow Pro recurring billing allow you to have those companies handle the actual recurring payments which means you don't have to store credit card information on your servers or even do anything once the subscription is created through their APIs.
If your subscriptions will vary in terms of cost or frequency, you'll need to use a service like Authorize.Net's Customer Information Manager (CIM) to create payment profiles for your customers. Basically you're storing credit card information on Authorize.Net's servers and whenever you want to make a subscription payment you tell Authorize.Net to charge the amount due to that payment profile. The drawback to this is you essentially have to build your own subscription system.
You usually find the recurring billing features in middleware gateways like Payflow Pro. In that case, it is invoked by a variation of the API you use for card processing. You usually set up the time span between billings and they perform the billing. You usually then reconcile the billing with the report that your processor sends you each month. In some cases, the payment gateway will post a notification to you that the billing was performed. You still have to reconcile the payments with the processor report because sometimes the notifications fail.
Canceling the recurring billing is also another API call.
If your gateway doesn't have the recurring feature, you obviously have to set up the billing yourself. This of course leads to storing card info and so forth. In this case, you usually tell the processor that it is a recurring transaction (which the gateway will do for you) so you get a discount on the transaction fees.
First, let apend the statement above "...tell the processor that it is a recurring transaction ...so you get a discount on the transaction fees". The true cost of credit card processing is a percentage fee and a per item fee based on the type of card presented ( and some other factors I won't delve into here.) The point being, on a wholesale price plan, the price would be the same regardless of whether it was recurring or not because there are no special rates for 'recurring' in interchange. But I digress.
"Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing?"
Don't take on storing credit card data no matter what. You can't afford the liability.
The right choice depends on several factors.
As to credit card portability, has anyone gone to Wells Fargo/ First Data and gotten their data out? (Braintree ISO/MSP). I guarantee it won't be pretty no matter what so I would focus on the right long term solution, rather than the exit strategy, though it will certainly weigh in.
Here's questions that need to be answered:
How many transactions per month? For very low volume, maybe a few hundred, pick paypal pro. It's easy to get into/ out of.
Are people more likely to pay with consumer cards or business credit cards? Interchange optimization is important if business cards. (CenPOS automatically optimizes the transaction for lowest interchange qualification, paypal and authorize.net do not)
What methods does my client accept payments? self pay on internet only? Phone orders? Mobile payments (special events or retail)? Choose a gateway that fits all their needs.
Do you need to charge on specific days- ie the 1st and 15th? Or any time? If on specific days, how will you prorate? Check the answer against the gateway flexibility.
What happens when a card expires?
What happens when a transaction is declined?
Who will need to see the payment data for customer service? How will they access it?
Determine your needs, then figure out which ones meet them.
For the record, CenPOS is the most robust solution, but may require more steps to integrate since they are newer to ecommerce.
Disclaimer: I've been a business user of paypal and authorize.net for probably a decade and more recently CenPOS. I'm also an authorize.net reseller, and CenPOS direct agent.
Just a heads-up about Payflow Gateway's Recurring Billing:
Their Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) is a fantastic feature, but only applies to their legacy APIs. For the time being, THE ONLY WAY to be notified by PayPal of a successful (recurring) billing transaction, is by inquiry. You will need to maintain a schedule to inquire, and send an individual inquiry for each, scheduled recurring billing transaction, one at a time. PayPal will not notify you if, for example:
A transaction is approaching
A transaction has occurred
This transaction was successful
This transaction resulted in fault
A credit card is approaching expiration
A dispute occurred
... and so on.
In my opinion, this renders their service useless.
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.