I'm trying to implement a recurring subscription to a website using PayPal Express Checkout Recurring Payments. One requirement is that creating the initial subscription should be as quick as possible: once the customer confirms the purchase, the merchant should receive the money and activate the subscription in a couple of minutes tops.
As far as I understand, I have the following options to go with:
use CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile only, with billing starting now
use CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile with initial payment, starting now
use DoExpressCheckoutPayment followed by CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile starting now + 1 billing period
Initial testing in the sandbox has shown that plain CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile schedules payments once a day, which rules this option out. Option 2 (Recurring Payments Profile with an initial payment) looked promising -- payments usually went through in a couple of seconds -- until the initial payments started being delayed by half an hour or more.
So, a couple of questions:
What is the intented way to implement on-line recurring payments via PayPal?
Does the sandbox share payment scheduling behavior with the live site?
What is the intented way to implement on-line recurring payments via PayPal?
Answer:The recurring payment via Express Checkout is a good way.
The subscription button via Website Payments Standard is also a good way which is more easy to implement.
Does the sandbox share payment scheduling behavior with the live site?
Answer:yes, sandbox has the same payment scheduling behavior as live.
BTW, if you want initial payment be charged right away, you should use Option 3, initial payment will be changed right away after DoExpressCheckoutPayment.
Option 2 only guarantee initial payment be charged in 24 hours.
Related
I am trying to implement paypal pro (our software should work for an italian account) for recurring payments.
I cannot use "express checkout" beacuse a subscription can vary more than the 15% limitation in 180 days and we don't have a trial period.
I have downloaded samples from paypal for .net, created a sandbox account from the developer dashboard but when i test it, i give an error message "DPRP is disabled for this merchant".
Later i have read that recurring payments are enabled for "direct payments" but they are enabled only in US, UK, Canada and New Zealand.
In Paypal Pro for Italy documentation i have not found any information for Recurring Payments.
How can I create a recurring payment in Paypal without "express checkout" then?
With an Italian PayPal account you're not going to be able to use Payments Pro.
What you could do, though, is use Express Checkout with Billing Agreements / Reference Transactions instead of setting up a recurring payments profile. This way you won't have the 15% limitation.
You would include the billing agreement parameters in your SetExpressCheckout request, and then that would setup the billing agreement so that you can run future calls to DoReferenceTransaction to process some amount in the future using the billing agreement.
This way the process happens without additional approval, no redirect required, etc. You just make the DoReferenceTransaction call and the money is moved immediately. Reference transactions can be any amount, so you would have no limitation there.
The only difference with this method is that you'll need to create a CRON job on your server that loops through all your due accounts each day to run the reference transaction for each one. So you're basically building your own recurring system instead of using PayPal's.
If you happen to be working with PHP this PayPal PHP SDK will make all of the API calls very quick and easy for you.
Let me first explain how our web site works.
Buyer purchase a service on our marketplace via PayPal, and then wait for approval from service provider
If provider doesn't approve or time lapse, then we (the marketplace) refund to buyer
If provider approves, then we (the marketplace) hold the payment until the service is provided by the provider
If there is no dispute between buyer and seller after 3 days, we will pay the fee (deduct marketplace fee) to the service provider.
Initially I was thinking to perform all the above manually, but after researching more about PayPal, I found that adaptive payments could have automate some of our processes.
Adaptive payment version:
Buyer make a preapproved payment to us (the marketplace)
If provider doesn't approve, then we (the marketplace) just cancel the payment
If provider approved,then we (the marketplace) execute the preapproved payment, and then go through delayed chained payment
3 days after the service is done, and no dispute, execute the delayed chained payment to pay provider
However, there are some limitation in this:
Our buyer may buy the service more than 90 days ahead, but delayed chained payment only hold the payment for 90 days.
While it is possible for us to manually send the fund to provider, but it is possible to write some code to automate the lapsed delayed chained payment?
After googling about preapproved payment, some site owner complained that when they actually execute the payment, many buyer actually don't have sufficient fund or for some other reason that can fail the payment.
Is there any solution to lock in buyer payment first, then proceed it after service provider approves the request. So we (the marketplace) can hands off on the refund part.
You can use Paypal adaptive payment.
First execute pay call with actionType of PAY_PRIMARY and wait for 3 day to pay to your secondary receiver (Provider).
Here is link to paypal documentation
Quick question about the notify_url HTML variable (from PayPal Payments Standard). I am specifying the URL as a variable that is sent to PayPal via a redirect URL for a recurring payment setup (all is working as expected when setting up the recurring payment).
But I am wondering, when PayPal goes to actually process a payment in the future (actual recurring payment), will it use the same URL for the IPN notification that was used during the recurring payment setup?
I have multiple IPN scripts, one for regular payments and one for recurring payments - I want to be sure that each future recurring payment uses a specific IPN script.
Cheers!
First, for the sake of terminology, if you're using HTML buttons then you're using Standard Subscriptions, not Recurring Payments. Technically, they're the same thing, but Recurring Payments is API based and IPN data is different for Standard Subscriptions vs. Recurring Payments. Just keep that in mind when searching for information about the two.
As for the IPN's, unfortunately, it will not continue to use that same URL. You'll need to make sure that IPN is configured in the PayPal account profile in order for future transactions related to the profile to trigger IPN's.
This goes for both Standard Subscriptions and Recurring Payments API transactions.
I am using nopCommerce shopping cart, there is no current implementation of IPN for Recurring Payment if i use PayPal Payment Pro (PayPal Direct) as Payment Method, however IPN works and change the order status only at first installment cycle but never works for second term. I want to develop this feature and spend more than 2 days on this and unable to figure out how to start. I have read all the documentation provided by PayPal but still confused. First of, if anyone tell me if IPN for Recurring Payment is supported by PayPal in case of Payment Pro (PayPal Direct) i am talking about developing this feature by writing code in asp.net MVC C# not buy buttons or etc., i am might have to use APIs? Secondly please help me to develop this feature i would really appropriate that.
IPN does work with PPPRP (Paypal payments pro recurring payments)
And no.. you don't really need to write any APIs.. but you will want to in order to re-capture payments that fail, re-start recurring payments that have failed three times or more.. etc..
Sources:
IPN is a message service that PayPal uses to notify you about events,
such as:
Recurring payment and subscription actions
I am looking to set up a recurring payment option for my website. I was thinking of going with PayFlow since it does not require expensive SSL. But I am not sure how to set up a recurrence payment where if the user decides to change the account type, we can automatically set up recurring payment for them to get charged next month. Not sure if this is possible?
A few problems, they charge almost $60/month and they require to have a Merchant Account (any suggestions)?
Can some one help with what type of service should I use? I am looking to not have credit card acceptance on my webpage because SSL is really expensive.
The webpage is in php.
PayPal Express Checkout does this, and more. While Payflow Link is generally a good and robust solution, Express Checkout has a bit more to offers in terms of features. It also redirects your buyers to a PayPal landing page for entering their card details.
I assume you can simply delete / disable a recurring payments profile and set up a new one whenever someone switches plans, right? In that case you'll want to look at the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile API.
Have a look at https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECRecurringPayments and https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1168
Do keep in mind however, that recurring payments on Express Checkout only works with existing PayPal accounts. Someone who doesn't have a PayPal account yet, will have to create one during checkout.
Paypal is usually a great solution. There is no problem with billing recurring payments (subscriptions).
You can read all about it here:
https://www.paypal.com/pdn-recurring