Change Failed Payment Attempts in Paypal Standard Subsribe Button - paypal

Question

A client requested that I set the Subsribe button to have reattempts at failed payments quite specifically. The account used is a Paypal Standard (not paypal pro) and from my research there's only the SRA variable that only toggles the pre-set 3-attempts in 5 days setting by Paypal, which is giving up on a subsriber too easily from my client's perspective. He'd want a total of 30 billing re-attempts, done every 3 days for the next 90 days.
I have only found other people wondering the same thing, but haven't found a solution. My current code on the page is this:
<form id='frmPayPalYearly' action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="_top">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="xxxxxxxx">
<input type="hidden" name="custom" value="Standard Annual Member with id:<?php echo $user_id;?>">
<input type="hidden" name="invoice" value="03/2013/<?php echo $user_id;?>/12/<?php echo uniqid()?>">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_subscribe_SM.gif" width="0" height="1">
</form>
If I add the SRA like so:
<input type="hidden" name="sra" value="1">
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this will tell Paypal to reattempt 3 times. Any way I can make Paypal reattempt 30 times?
Anyone has any ideas?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do.
The API products actually provide parameters to specify this sort of thing, but they're ignored. It's a known issue that I've been hoping to see fixed for years now. I'm not holding my breath. Everything falls to the default of 3 attempts 5 days apart and then suspends.
If you were using the API's then you could at least automate the process of re-activating the plugin when it becomes suspended on that 3rd attempt so that it falls right back into a fresh 3-attempt cycle, and just keep doing that as many times as you want your application to allow.
With Payments Standard, though, there isn't an API that will let you do this. You would need to switch to Express Checkout API's in order to do that, and then you would handle the auto-re-activate within an IPN solution.