I have a large number of monthly subscribers that I would like to bill using paypal reference transactions.
Does either paypal API (classic or rest) support submission of multiple reference transactions in a single request, or do I need to submit each reference transaction within its own request?
Each reference transaction must be a separate request. It's also worth noting that (at least with Classic) you have to disable CVV2 checks (since you don't have it and neither does PayPal, per PCI compliance) or your call will fail.
Related
Does the paypal fee applicable to any call within their apis or a particular call?
For instance, if I use any call within the /billing-agreements apis, do I get charged the 2.9% or less, plus $0.30 per transaction?
If not, which api do I use that charges me?
In the case, it only charges me a particular api, does that mean all other apis are free to use? how many calls can I make per day/month/year?
Thanks for your help!
PayPal will only charge you on successful transaction, Meaning they will not charge you for setting up a billing agreements nor for looking up a transaction with API, They will only charge you when the transaction of that billing agreement go through.
They are not charging the API call directly.
I coundn't find anything on limits in the documentation and as far as I know you can do an unlimited number of API call to paypal
Check the following link for PayPal documentation
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/
EDIT After Comment
Im not exactly sure how it works.
But I think PayPal system is somewhat queued based, In the sense that some API call are for creating subscription, They wont charge on the API call, But they will charge on every transaction recurring every month.. You don't need to make a API call every month to make the charge go through,
but still you'll see charges on your account.
Some call like create_payment will have a response with "Successful"
But only after you also called payment_execute but wont tell you what transaction_fee you had.
To get what transaction_fee you had You need to call with an other API call after to get that information
payment_get
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.
TL;DR- How do I know if I really did get paid, via the PayPal NVP API?
Longer version
I'm writing code to automagically process and classify transactions from our PP business account. I have code that calls NVP methods TransactionSearch and GetTransactionDetails and fills a few database tables with the results that are returned. This happens every day for the previous 24 hours' worth of transactions. So far, so good.
I began from the assumption that the same information available via manual CSV export via the PayPal web interface would be available via the API, but I'm now discovering that either this is not the case, or there is another API call I should be making to get the rest of the information I need.
In particular, GetTransactionDetails doesn't seem to return the equivalent of CSV field "Reference Txn ID" and, in a few cases, I can't see how to connect related transactions.
So, my question is how can I obtain the reference transaction ID, or how do I otherwise connect these associated transactions?
Example 1
This is (probably) the most common sort of situation where the reference transaction ID is needed.
Depending on the buyer's funding source, you may either see a purchase complete instantly or, if the transaction must be cleared, complete across three separate transactions:
The original payment, detail of which gives buyer's name, email, address, invoice number, item ID, gross, fee and net amounts etc.
followed immediately by a debit of the net amount
followed, in a few days, by a credit of the net amount.
It is crucial to match the three transactions because you don't know whether the payment will succeed or be declined (and therefore whether you've actually got the money) unless you do.
In the data I have available to me at the moment, there is only one such example of this situation, and calls to GetTransactionDetails for the settlement transactions fail completely ("The transaction could not be loaded") — possibly because, in that one instance, I know that the payment was made with a credit card by somebody who doesn't have a PayPal account.
This might be an anomaly, or it might be the common case. I have seen this triplet of transactions quite frequently in other PayPal accounts, but not this one, so I can't be sure.
Example 2
A payment in a foreign currency will typically generate three transactions, rather like in Example 1:
The original payment (eg in €), the detail of which gives the sender's name and email address etc;
this is then followed by an immediate debit of the (probably net) amount in €
and then an immediate credit in USD.
From the point of view of the NVP API, GetTransactionDetails usually returns values labelled SETTLEAMT and SETTLEAMTCURRENCYCODE for the original payment. No further processing is required.
However, a recent such transaction (for reasons that even PayPal could not adequately explain) did not auto-convert, and the GetTransactionDetails call lacks the settlement values even after the conversion was performed manually.
The transactions are all there — but I cannot see any programmatic way to associate them because an attempt to call GetTransactionDetails on currency conversion transactions returns the error "You can not get the details for this type of transaction".
—
Any advice or experience relating to automatic processing of PayPal transactions? Is there any way to duplicate, programmatically, the same data included in the CSV export?
If necessary, I'd be happy to process the CSV export if there were some way to generate it programmatically, but I don't even know of a way to do that (short of a Selenium-driven solution full of pitfalls).
GetTransactionDetails will include a PARENTTRANSACTIONID if there is a related transaction. For example, a refund transaction would have a parent transaction ID.
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 have a site that bills variable monthly amounts based on the subscriber's usage (typically $3 to $60). Currently, the 200 or so subscribers set up a monthly PP subscription that may or may not match their usage. I would probably use IPN to collect that info, but currently do it by hand.
I would like to use an API to request and receive the exact monthly amount. Which API? I have read elsewhere that Adaptive Payments may be the one to use, but is that appropriate/accessible to my business size?
Additionally, where would I post a request for a programmer for such?
You would need to utilize Reference Transactions for that.
Basically, you setup a billing agreement with the user an then you can use the Billing Agreement ID that you get back with the DoReferenceTransaction API any time in the future to process any amount necessary without further approval.
So you'll need to create your own system to automatically process payments on a daily basis as necessary, but this method will allow you to handle variable amounts.
If you're using Payments Pro you can do the same thing, but you don't do a "billing agreement". What you can do instead is run a $0 authorization, and then you would use the transaction ID you get back from that in the DoReferenceTransaction request instead of a Billing Agreement ID.