I've integrated Paypal's Classic API with a website that is currently happily working in production. I create a "billing agreement" for customers and then use that billing agreement to perform a DoReferenceTransaction API Operation with PAYMENTACTION=Sale and this collects money from my customers.
I'd like to provide functionality for admins to cancel or void a sale transaction if possible, but the Paypal DoVoid operation appears to be limited to authorizations and orders but not actual sales. I do see that Paypal offers the RefundTransaction API operation and I expect to implement this, but I was hoping to perhaps Void or Cancel a sale that had not been collected yet. It's been my experience with other payment gateways that cancelling a sale before the money is actually collected (typically at close of business on weekdays) is cleaner and less likely to incur the wrath of your merchant bank's escrow specialists.
Is it possible to Void a transaction with PAYMENTACTION=Sale performed via the DoReferenceTransaction API operation? Or must you use the RefundTransaction API operation?
No it is not possible to void a sale transaction.
If you can't change paymentaction from sale to auth/order then the only option you have is to use RefundTransaction API (PayPal has NVP as well as rest end point for refund API)
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I have been manually issuing invoices to charge my clients for services using Paypal.
Now I am creating an interface to allow them to purchase the services automatically on my website.
I also want to show them a history of their purchases. However, I cannot show a history of paid invoices using the Transaction Search API; I need to use the Invoicing > Search Invoices API.
I have used the Paypal Payments API to manage the payment side of new products, which now correctly produces an itemised transaction and allows the customer to checkout. But this does not produce an invoice.
How can I simultaneously produce an invoice (i.e which can be retrieved by the Invoicing API to show previous payments) and allow the customer to pay it? It seems like the Invoicing API works around the idea of sending an invoice to client by email, but this is unnecessary. I want them to pay it immediately (and already have the Payment API setup for this).
So what would a useful workflow be?: Use my Paypal Payment API to receive and authorise the payment, and on authorisation, use the Invoicing API to produce an invoice which reflects this and then updates the invoice status to paid? Or am I missing something easier here?
The Invoicing API is not meant to be mixed or used with any other API. It is for generating invoices to be sent by email or in link form.
General ecommerce payment processing (without invoice links) is entirely separate, there is no crossover. You should ensure you are using the current v2/checkout/orders API to receive new payments, not older v1 APIs.
As far as displaying a list of previous purchases to your customers, you shouldn't reply on PayPal for this (except perhaps in the case of invoices since this is part of the point of offloading invoice management to PayPal). But for normal web purchases, PayPal is not a database -- it is a payment processing service. Keep track of all your own order information, and simply store PayPal transaction IDs when they complete for your own accounting records -- but the ID you reference with the customer should be your own unique order ID, which you can pass to PayPal in your purchase_units[0].invoice_id when you create an order for checkout approval.
I have some questions about subscription functionality using REST API. We have implemented recurring payments using "Express Checkout NVP/SOAP Integration" but for us it isn't optimal, because:
Webhooks easier and more usable then IPN messages;
We can't force customers to pay from PayPal balance.
That's why I want to rewrite it with REST API. I think the flow will be like:
User press button and we make the first request to get auth token;
Create billing plan;
Activate billing plan;
Create billing agreement;
Because of we're using PayPal payments here we redirect the customer to approve payment;
Execute billing agreement.
My questions are:
Is this flow correct?
To redirect customer for approving payment we need to make four requests to PayPal API servers, is it normal?
Should I create and activate a billing plan for every customer or I can use one plan for all customers?
If so can I create the plan in the merchant's profile page or I can do it only programmatically?
Let me see if I can answer your questions and provide some samples.
Yes, that flow is correct for the first request. If you already have a plan that you'd like to subscribe people to created, you can skip those billing plan steps. More on that below.
For the REST APIs, yes that's the normal flow for PayPal. Think of the plan as setting up the architecture of the payment that you'd like to offer (such as a subscription plan for a service). You set this up once and then can subscribe many people to that same subscription plan using a billing agreement.
If the details of the plan are the same for each person, then create one plan and then use a billing agreement for each person to subscribe them all to that same plan.
I haven't seen an integration of this with the profile system, but it's an interesting idea. For the time being, as far as I know you'll need to do this programmatically.
I've also created some new quickstart guides on the site that should help through creating the billing plan and agreements:
Billing plans: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/quickstart/create-billing-plan/
Billing agreements: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/quickstart/create-billing-agreement/
I have a more practical example of this billing plan / agreement integration in a Slack bot payment sample, if that helps: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/service-integrations/slack-bot/subscribe/
I am using the PayPal REST API and would like to create a transaction that includes a combination of recurring and one-time payments in a single transaction.
According to the documentation for the NVP integration, it seems such a transaction is possible. However, I'm not sure how to accomplish the same using the REST API. I have searched the REST API documentation as well as the .NET SDK examples and cannot find an example of a transaction that uses a mix of recurring and one-time payments.
Our use case: We process transactions for downloadable software - most of the products are one-time purchases, but some of the products (such as anti-virus products) have a recurring billing component associated with them. As such, we need to process a single transaction where one of the items is a regular purchase, and the other is a part of a recurring plan. We plan to process these transactions using the "PayPal" payment method (i.e. not direct credit card). Specifically, we'll be using Express Checkout.
Any guidance would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Based on what you're doing about, here's what I think your best course of action might be:
When you have a user checking out that may have some multi-month subscriptions, and some single time subscriptions, you set up a new billing plan with each item to be purchased. For the subscriptions, you set up an entry that is set to multiple months, and for a single payment you set a single month payment (see https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/create-billing-plan/ for an example of multiple entries).
Next, you need to execute that plan for the user via a billing agreement (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/create-billing-agreement/). Within the billing agreement you can set the start date to execute immediately, which should complete the checkout process for both billing orders right then.
Let me know if that works out for your scenario.
I am looking for alternatives to stripe's per-user pricing subscription : I need :
to charge my user a recurring payment which depends on the number of user accounts he has
to be able to change the number of users via an API, with customer validation is ok, but ideally without changing a plan nor creating a new type of plan. Check status, cancel, etc. via the API too.
Ideally with no up-front charge = fee + percentage of transaction
I found out that stripe might be a good option (see per-user pricing here https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions) and unfortunately Paypal does not seem to offer this kind of feature (plans can only be increased by 20% each 180 days or you need to cancel previous profile and create a new one). Or am I mistaking about Paypal ?
What alternatives would exist for such needs?
What you want are Reference Transactions, in which case you run an original authorization or sale transaction, and then in the future you'd run DoReferenceTransaction with the original transaction ID and any new amount you need to process. It will process immediately without any redirection or additional authorization required at that point.
If you use reference transactions with Payments Pro (direct credit cards) then all you need to do is save the original auth or sale transaction ID to your database so that you can pull it out for the user when you need to process a future payment using DoReferenceTransaction.
For PayPal payments you'll use Express Checkout w/ Billing Agreements, which will give you back a billing agreement ID. In that case, the billing agreement ID is what you'd pass into future calls to DoReferenceTransaction.
In either case you'll need to build your own system to lookup payments that need to be processed each day and loop through them making a call to DoReferenceTransaction for each one.
I'm trying to implement PayPal on a completely custom shopping cart and have been unable to figure out which API for recurring payments we need.
We ship a physical product every 2, 3, 4, 6 months so shipment and payment have to both happen together. In addition it must be easy for the user to change their shipment date - or add or remove items to their regular shipments without too much stress (either on their part or mine).
I've generally looked at Paypal's recurring billing as more suited to software based subscriptions and I don't think this is the API I need. I'd like to just bill the customer via a billing agreement and then initiate the shipment.
The way Skype does it seems to be ideal - they establish a billing agreement (shown in my PayPal account under 'My account > Profile > Pay List'
but I cannot seem to find that in the SOAP API document.
What is the API I need to create a billing agreement that I can trigger whenever I want. Can this be done with Express Checkout API ?
The API you are looking for is called reference transactions. This allows you to set up a billing agreement with a customer, get back a token, and then use that token to issue charges in the future. It can be done via the Express Checkout API.
You have to contact PayPal customer support to get this activated for your account before you can use it.