Paypal billing agreement does not pay quickly? - paypal

Question

I've made a Paypal plan like the following, at 49$ :
{
'id': 'P-PAYPAL-ID',
'name': "My Plan",
'description': 'My description of the plan',
'type': 'INFINITE',
'merchant_preferences': {
'auto_bill_amount': 'YES',
"initial_fail_amount_action": "CONTINUE",
"max_fail_attempts": "3",
"return_url": "https://example.com/paypal/response",
"cancel_url": "https://example.com/paypal/response"
},
'payment_definitions': [{
'name': 'Monthly payment',
'type': 'REGULAR',
'frequency': 'MONTH',
'frequency_interval': 1,
'cycles': 0,
'amount': {
'value': '49',
'currency': 'USD'
}
}]
}
I've created the plan and enabled it following the documentation here.
Then I created a Billing Agreement by following the steps :
Create the billing agreement
Redirect the user to the Paypal page to accept the agreement
Execute the agreement from the URL I got in 1.
Everything works fine, in my sandbox user account, I can see the "Recurring payment details" marked as Active.
I subscribed my server to the webhooks.
My problem is the following : The payment is not done immediately? I've waited an hour, and nothing is paid!
Is there a request I forgot to make to "execute the executed agreement"...?

Answer 1

The short and sweet answer is that it's not possible. Within the agreement you have the option to set a startDate value. Based on my experience the below statement is what I've concluded.
It looks like the payments just process based on the date being before or after 07:00 UTC of the current date.
For example. The current date time is 2017-05-04T04:50:00.00Z I set my start date to be the current UTC date time plus 30 seconds. Because the agreement date is set to a value greater then the current date time the API doesn't throw an error, but it DOESN'T set your time to be what you specified. Instead it sets it to 2017-05-04T07:00:00Z.
Now, if you have the same date time of 2017-05-04T04:50:00.00Z and instead of adding 30 seconds you add 24hrs you'd think that your time would then be set to be 2017-05-05T04:50:00.00Z. But no, the time will be set to 2017-05-05T07:00:00Z.
So it seems like these just process everyday at 07:00 UTC and you can't specify anything but the date.