I am working on a new PayPal implementation that needs to support recurring payments (billing plans and agreements). In the developer documentation, I see an article for "Handling Recurring Payments". At the top of this article is a message that reads "Important: This integration method is Deprecated as of January 1, 2017. For new integrations, see the "PayPal Express Checkout Integration Guide". However, there is absolutely ZERO discussion or coverage in the Express Checkout Integration Guide on how to initiate a recurring payment (set up a billing plan or agreement), the guide only covers how to initiate a one-time sale.
Is it possible to either update this documentation appropriately or provide some more details on how to initiate other types of payments via Express Checkout besides one-time sales?
Related
I currently use Paypal Chained Adaptive Payments on my website to split payments between merchants. Currently, we are undergoing a rewrite during which time I went back to read some of the documentation on Adaptive Payments.
I noticed this message below which gives me the vibe that Adaptive Payments may be phased out/discontinued in the future.
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.
Is this case? Should I be looking for a new payment solution?
Well, this true. PayPal has finally decided to take this off from its available product since January 2017. The option left is by using their new product called Marketplace. This however required a permission to accomplish.
I am investigating the recurring payment for paypal. looks express checkout is we we needed. but the document page https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/ht_ec-recurringPaymentProfile-curl-etc/ is under Express Checkout - NVP/SOAP (Deprecated).
And this page(https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/) said:
Important: This integration method is Deprecated as of January 1, 2017. For new integrations, see the PayPal Express Checkout Integration Guide.
new page doesn't say anything about recurring.
Is recurring payments still available for paypal express checkout?
They are trying to move away from the Classic APIs, which is why they're labeling them as deprecated now, but they aren't going away any time soon. There are still way too many people and apps integrated with Classic, and you can still build new apps with those APIs, too. I still prefer Classic over REST myself.
For the REST API you can take a look at Billing Agreements and/or Billing Plans.
If you purely created Express Checkout (without having additional API call), you are advise to integrate with Express Checkout v4 which located here. But if you wanted to Creates with Recurring Payment, the option is still available. PayPal does not finalize yet the date of deprecation application for Express Checkout.
I am developing an IPN application for a non-profit who wants to take monthly recurring pledges. The IPN variables manual has two separate entries: subscription & recurring and it appears recurring is what I need and so I would use the txn_type=recurring_payment.
The problem is that when I turn to the "HTML Variables for PayPal Payments Standard" manual, I can't find an appropriate _xclick value for recurring payments. Yes there is one for subscriptions but nothing for _xclick.
How then do I code for recurring payments in the HTML? Or is recurring payments not available to HTML Standard Payments?
While technically they are the same thing, PayPal Standard (ie. basic payment buttons) calls it "Subscriptions" where-as the APIs call it "Recurring Payments".
If you want to stick with Payments Standard you would just use the IPN Subscription variables in your IPN code logic. If you do switch to Express Checkout then that's when you would use the Recurring Payments IPN params.
I would recommend using Express Checkout w/ Recurring Payments if you can. This would require some more in depth coding. Assuming you're comfortable with PHP, this PHP PayPal SDK would make the Express Checkout and Recurring Payments API calls very quick and easy for you.
The recurring-payment feature you are referring to is an API based product. If you are using PayPal Payments Standard, the subscription variables are your only option.
You can use Recurring Payments with Express Checkout. Here is a link to the developer documentation:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/ht_ec-recurringPaymentProfile-curl-etc/
I currently have a system in place utilizing the Express Checkout SOAP API to complete a customer's e-commerce checkout. Imagine a subscription service. I provide the option of a one-time purchase via DoExpressCheckoutPayment as well as the option to conduct application-triggered monthly payments via DoReferenceTransactionRequest (I wanted more control which is why I did not go the route of CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile). Now I would like to allow guest checkout, while also maintaining the ability to perform monthly payments.
In testing I:
Verified that guest checkout was allowed in the PayPal account UI
Set SolutionType = Sole
Set LandingPage = Billing
But I was unsuccessful in getting the guest checkout option.
HOWEVER, I noticed that by changing BillingCodeType from MERCHANTINITIATEDBILLING to NONE solved my issue. But if I changed the billing code type to none and checked out as a guest, the future monthly payments would fail due to not having a billing agreement.
I haven't found an obvious answer to my exact question but based on bits of documentation that I've found it's seeming like the billing agreement is required. Is that correct?
I am new to PayPal integrating and need to integrate PayPal recurring for subscriptions. I googled for that, but I am confused with below questions.
Which API should I use with PayPal recurring, WPS or Paypal express checkout? Which one will be good?
Is there any good example or help to integrate this?
Thanks a ton in advance.
Good overview of recurring payments: Handling recurring payments
I'm using the Lionite PHP Paypal class. It's not free, but even if you're not going to use it, read through that page because it contains some useful info that is omitted from the Paypal docs.
If I understand correctly, Express Checkout requires your customer to set up a Paypal account, so Website Payments Standard would be a better option.
Unfortunately the Paypal SDK only has code examples for direct payment. If you want to use Website Payments Pro with Direct Payment, be aware of PCI compliance (which can be expensive and time-consuming) and also be aware that services like BrainTree exist which have transparent redirect, thus helping you to avoid PCI compliance (I haven't used this service however).
Express checkout code example: https://github.com/hrendoh/PayPal-Recurring-Payment-example
Set up your sandbox account at http://developer.paypal.com
Update: IPN for recurring payments is a nightmare. Not only are the recurring payment IPN responses completely undocumented, but none of the support staff I talked to had a clue about them either (in some cases they gave me incorrect answers to questions). Here is a list that others have put together, but all of these resources are incomplete:
https://www.x.com/developers/community/blogs/ppmacole/recurring-payments-ipns?page=1
http://docs.ipn-easy.com/html/T_Rolosoft_IpnEasy_Net_PayPal_TxnType.htm
Unfortunately because of the limits placed on recurring payments with express checkout, direct payment was the only option for me. I strongly suggest that if you need to do direct payment with recurring payments that you find a different payment provider.