I m planning to integrate micropayment in my ASP.NET website. I need to use PayPal to achieve this.
The cost of the service I deliver is low, about $1 per month. I'd like to know more about PayPal service for this kind of cheap transactions.
How much does PayPal hold for each $1 payment ? I found this explaining the PayPal conditions for micropayment. Any feedback on this ?
Plus, how does PayPal handle currency conversion ? My service is worldwide, so I want my users to be able to buy my product not only using dollars, but euros or another currency.
Thanks
In the link you quoted the fees section is expandable and you can see the Micropayments pricing:
5% + $0.05
Signing up for it doesn't require any vetting or contract changes. Contact Customer Service and they file a request to a team that enables Micropayments. Should be done within a few days.
Currency conversion and cross-border transacitons are also in this page:
International Sales: The pricing table above applies to domestic payments in US dollars. There's an additional 2.5% charge for any currency conversion and a 1% charge to receive payments from another country.
If you decide to charge your buyers in USD only, they will be able to choose if they wish he card issuer or PayPal to convert the money. Most won't even notice the conversion took place and it will make your reconciliation much easier.
Related
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 having nightmare figuring out which payment sdk to follow to charge my customers on daily basis for the due outstanding to them from my application which varies(metered charging my customer).
the recurring payment only helps to pay the fixed amount for certain billing cycles.but i have variable amount to charge daily.
Is there any best approach to charge my customers on daily basis for the amount due to them from my software for the digital service i provide to them.
Thanks in advance
any suggestions and comments are welcome.
PayPal offers 3 integration types:
1. Express Checkout (the most common)
2. Adaptive Payments
3. PayPal Payments Pro
You're trying option #1, which lacks support for variable pries.
Both Adaptive Payments and PayPal Payments Pro offer recurring charges with dynamic amounts, but require PayPal's approval and quite a bit of paperwork. If you're approved, the APIs are pretty simple in both cases.
May I suggest some easier alternatives?
1. Use Recurly who are already approved for #2 above (adaptive payments). Other good alternatives are BrainTree and Stripe.
2. Change your pricing policy to a monthly charge of $X, granting a set of tokens. The user can upgrade to a higher plan to get more tokens every month.
We'd like to find a payment provider that lets us do something similar to Hailo, ie:
Users sign up and give us their credit card details/authorise us to charge their account. They only need to do this once.
In Hailo's case, users might take a cab journey at any time and be billed any amount (within reason). In our case, users might need a job done at any time, again with an invoice for an arbitrary amount.
So ideally we'd be able to charge users accounts at any time, for any amount, without further authorisation. This is possible because Hailo (and I believe Uber) have it implemented. However, I don't know if they use a third-party payment provider or rolled their own.
Something like BrainTree's recurring payments is close to what we want, but not exactly. We want to be able to bill at arbitrary times, not on a fixed schedule.
The best option we currently have is to use recurring billing, ie save invoices and then charge them all at once at the end of the month. This isn't ideal from a cashflow -perspective, though. Another option is to use GoCardless' variable billing, (you ask customers permission to bill up to £X per month), though from speaking to people it seems they'd be leary of that as it seems like an upfront commitment.
Can we do it our way? How do companies like Hailo and Uber do it?
We're in the UK, by the way.
In PayPal world - we call this kind of functionality as Reference Transactions - here are the 2 how-tos that would give you more info on how to implement reference transactions with PayPal accounts and direct credit cards:
Reference Transactions for PayPal users
Reference Transactions for Credit/Debit cards
You can also use our Preapproval functionality - which would give you delegated access to a PayPal account to make payments on behalf of them. Here is it's how-to.
Full disclosure, I work as a developer for Braintree.
Using Braintree you can create transactions at any time, not just on a recurring basis. In fact Uber is a Braintree customer. You would store the card in the Braintree vault and create a new transaction when you are ready to bill the customers credit card.
Braintree has recently announced an international expansion that will support merchants in the UK and other countries in the next few months.
From your description Authorize.net CIM will do the job - http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/cim/
It's PCI compliant and let you store your customer credit card details with them and return a token for the customer. Then you can use this token to charge customer credit card whenever you need. Also their recurring billing facility would let you charge a fixed recurring charge if needed - http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/automatedrecurringbilling/
DataCash will let you do this, amongst many, many other things. You just provide their 16-digit reference number in the XML rather than a card number.
(Note: I'm an ex-DataCash employee, and we use DataCash as a payment gateway at my current work.)
Currently, I use PayPal for payment processing. Almost 90% of the items are sold for $.99 and would like to use Paypals's Micropayment account, but PayPal states "support for Micropayments to merchants for US to US, GB to GB, AU to AU, and EU to EU transactions". My company is located in the US but the customers are very global. Does this mean using Micropayment option, I can't take payment from someone who lives in Europe or outside the US? Currently I am using the regular account and I am paying $.34 for each sale, which is very unprofitable. Are there other payment processing service I can use with lower fee?
Thank you.
Unless you have insanely high volume like fast-food chains do, it is very difficult to obtain a merchant account where the transaction pricing is feasible for micro-payments. Most providers will suggest an aggregation model where you sell your content but only bill your customers periodically, i.e. bill them once a month so that several purchases are bundled together, making the transaction fees less of an impact.
Here is one provider offering such a model:
http://www.allcharge.com/services-billing-micro-payments.asp
I do not work for the above company (in fact, I work for a payments company that does not offer micropayments).
Not the answer you were hoping for, I'm sure, but hopefully it helps.
Take a look at www.carrot.org which runs a micropayment system. Customers using carrotPay load funds into an electronic purse - WebPurse - and can make payments with 2 clicks if you have a Carrot buy button installed on your site. The buy button can be set up along side other payment methods on your site. The webpurse automatically converts the currency so if your client has GBP in their purse, they will be presented with a GBP price for authorisation but the merchant receives USD if this is the currency they used to price the product. Charges work out at 6% - 10% maximum. The Webpurses can also used for some kind of loyalty schemes as they will store many different currencies, real and virtual. If you would like more information please contact andy#carrot.org
Take a look at Google's In-App Payments. The fee is a flat 5% which is great for transactions
http://code.google.com/apis/inapppayments/
I do work for Google, but I've taken a look at other similar products and can honestly say that In-App Payments is a very competitive product.
You can use Randpay - scalable micro-payment system, based on blockchain: https://medium.com/#emer.tech/randpay-6a028f16c82a
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.