I am looking for some advice on how to add Paypal as a mean of payment on our website.
I found this page which matches our use case of recurring payments of varying amounts of money on a varying schedule.
However, this is deprecated and I could not find the equivalent concept in the new APIs.
The billing agreement concept in the new API seems to be used with billing plans only which must define a specific schedule of payments which we don't want. We'd like our users to authorize us to charge their Paypal account in the future. The amounts are not defined, the schedule is not defined. We want to trigger the payments in the future.
How can we do that?
Is there a way to get an authorization token that we can then reuse to create payments of different amounts?
Thanks
The REST APIs support Billing Agreements and Billing Plans. Billing Agreements are what you're after, and Billing Plans would be more like a subscription with the same amount being charged at the same interval.
That said, while it does display that Express Checkout Classic is now deprecated, that's not exactly true. They do hope to move people into REST at some point, but it's going to be a very long time. There are way too many people still using Classic, and they are still adding new features to it, too. Also, things like Guest Checkout are not yet available in REST, so you have to do that with Classic.
I still use Classic myself, and I would still recommend it as of today.
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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.
Trying to implement automatic payments via the Paypal Reference Transaction API.
Manage to make it work on sandbox but I noticed on the customer summary page, it refers to the payments as "preapproved payments".
Comparing it to services I used where automatic payments are enabled, the customer summary page shows them as "automatic payments".
Now I'm wondering if these are two different things. Or maybe the sandbox site has outdated/updated naming.
Are they the same?
Well, there are lots of different terms for these you might be seeing, but they are different things.
If you see preapproved payments, preapproval, billing agreement, reference transaction, then that's referring to having an agreement on file that allows your application to process payments on behalf of the user. This could be for any amount at any time, so you can build much more flexible apps with this sort of thing. It's also harder to get approved because it gives you, the app owner, a lot of power. Your app would be in charge of triggering payments when necessary.
Subscriptions, recurring payments, recurring billing would be referring to where you create a profile on the PayPal system, and their system takes care of triggering payments for you. These are more limited because it's a fixed amount that gets processed at a fixed interval.
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 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 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.