I would like to ask you about regular payment in paypal using billing plans. I use the PHP library from paypal (REST API) to create billing plans and agreement for users but I have some problems:
I have two plans: STANDARD and PRO. What when the user buys a standard plan and after some time will be want to switch to another? What with the old subscription? I don't see the option to cancel subscription via REST API. Should I create a personal billing plan for every user and in this case update this changes?
My plans include some additional parameters like: ,,How many people can use one account" - and this parameter influences on the final price. I don't know what I should do to get regular payments with flexible parameters.
Should I create a billing plan for every user and then create an agreement for this personal billing plan? What if user paid for 12 months and after 9 months will want to change some parameters - then I should upgrade price in the billing price (for stability in the next billing cycle) and to get this difference in plan costs I should create the normal payment by http://paypal.github.io/PayPal-PHP-SDK/sample/doc/payments/CreatePaymentUsingPayPal.html?
Cheers!
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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 am trying to incorporate a member subscription on my website using the paypalrestsdk with python in a django application. I understand that I need to do the following:
Set up a BillingPlan for each type of subscription (ie. a monthly plan for $10 a month and a yearly plan for $100 a month)
Create a BillingAgreement, which (based on the user choice of billing plan) redirects the user to approve the agreement and which returns the agreement object which will give me the ability to access the plan information in order to update, suspend, reactivate the agreement.
Finally, in order to get started, I need to execute the BillingAgreement. This is the part that confuses me. Do I execute the agreement each month (for my users who have agreed to monthly subscription) or do I execute the agreement one time in order to tell PayPal to automatically process the monthly payment? If the latter case is the answer then how would I know if a payment failed for some reason? (Or do I need to check every time the user logs in by retrieving their BillingAgreement and searching for transactions within a particular date range for that agreement to make sure they are up to date and none of them failed?)
I have looked at the PayPal developer docs as well as GitHub samples. I have also successfully written code to create and execute one-time payments using the sandbox and all seems to be working just fine. I am just confused by how the recurring payments in the REST api work - specifically see #3 above.
You do not need to execute the billing agreement each month but only once to start the agreement i.e. tell PayPal to automatically process the monthly payment.
You can use the search for transactions feature to check that none of the payments of a user failed, but you might only need to do that at the start of every monthly payment cycle for a particular user. As opposed to everytime they log in. In the future, we will try to provide better notification mechanisms to inform the merchant that a payment on a billing agreement has failed/changed status.
I am wondering is this even possible or is there a simple way to do this. I am building a file-sharing site like Droplr or CloudApp and by fun chance unlike those two sites I do not offer fixed pricing, instead I offer pay-per-use billing on the amount of storage the customer uses up. But there is a small yearly fee for plans.
So lets say customer selects Tier 1 - Basic Plan. The plan allows for 5GB max file size, $5/yr fee and $1.00/gb
How would I go about charging the customer for this? Sure the first $5/yr can processed fairly easy and added to PayPal subscription and recurring payments, but should there be 2nd subscription for the storage?
I would recommend taking a look at the Adaptive Payments API, specifically Preapproval and Pay.
That will allow people to setup preapproved payments with you based on criteria set when the profile is created. Then you can charge them at any time with variable amounts as long as they fall within the profile's criteria.
Another option would be to utilize Reference Transactions (DoReferenceTransaction) after running an original Auth or Sale through Express Checkout or Payments Pro.
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.