I need to charge a credit card 50% on booking and the rest of 50% on a later date. Is there any other option beside recurring payment? This is only a two time payment so not like any subscription.
Any suggestions are welcome, I feel like recurring payments option is to complicated for this and as I know a recurring payment has no obligation to be paid.
A reference transaction could do this. It would work like this
You charge your customer the initial booking fee. You record the transaction ID from Paypal.
Within 90 days (not sure if this has changed) you would then call (in the Classic API anyways) DoReferenceTransaction with your original transaction ID. Note that you WILL have to accept that the CVV2 (which neither you nor Paypal can store due to PCI compliance) will not match (at least in my experience). It's not a huge risk since the first transaction likely had to pass that check but it is a caveat.
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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 need to send a cart to PayPal for payment using the FORM integration method where the cart value has already had a part payment made against it, usually by another means, like 'on account' or a gift card for example.
Is there an accepted way to do this?
The only thing I can find is sending the already paid amount as a discount amount but that's not 100% ideal as it isn't in reality a discount.
The other option I came up with was to just send a single line cart with an item of 'Balance of your order XXXX' but this is also not ideal as the customer wouldn't then see the actual items listed when on PayPal.
Many thank.
I can think of 3 PayPal features that you might possibly use to do this:
Authorization and Capture
Authorization & Capture, or Auth/Capture, allows you to authorize the availability of funds for a transaction but delay the capture of funds until a later time. This is often useful for merchants who have a delayed order fulfillment process. Authorize & Capture also enables merchants to modify the original authorization amount due to order changes occurring after the initial order is placed, such as taxes, shipping or gratuity.
Recurring Payments
PayPal Recurring Payments allows you to bill a buyer for a fixed amount of money on a fixed schedule.
Note You can also setup another form of recurring payments using reference transactions to handle payments for varying amounts of money on a varying schedule.
Reference Transactions
A reference transaction is a financial transaction from which subsequent transactions can be derived. For example, a buyer purchases an item on your site, and you use the PayPal transaction ID or reference transaction ID later to initiate another transaction. Reference transactions and billing agreements also enable you to handle recurring payments for varying amounts of money on a varying schedule.
You can read more about these features here: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/admin/intro/
I have a bit of experience setting up online payment systems that accept credit card numbers and then pass them over to a gateway for a one time payment.
However, I now need to setup a system that can handle automatic recurring billing - where a user provides their credit card number and is automatically billed on a monthly basis from that point forward.
I am wondering what the best way to approach something like this is? (I notice that Paypal Payflow Pro does have a recurring billing feature, but I am a bit unclear on how it works.)
Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing? If possible, I would greatly prefer to avoid keeping a local record of credit card numbers for repeat processing.
Thanks (in advance) for your help.
There's a midpoint between building your own recurring billing and Auth.net's ARB or PayPal's recurring billing (both of which have their disadvantages). There are a number of providers that handle all the details and complexities of recurring billing, and simply report the charges to your payment gateway for processing at the interval you determine.
The most critical piece to look at is which services to credit card tokenization and support credit card data portability - this will ensure that your customer data isn't locked in with a billing provider and that you can take it with you if you choose another provider in the future. This also means that these providers store the customer credit card data for you, so you can greatly reduce your PCI compliance.
Take a look at Recurly (Disclaimer: I manage their customer and technical support) and Braintree. Both services will handle your recurring billing, credit card tokenization, and support credit card data portability.
Recurring billing is easy to handle and offload to a third party if your recurring amount is constant (e.g. the amount a user pays never changes in amount or frequency). Services like Authorize.Net's Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) and Paypal Payflow Pro recurring billing allow you to have those companies handle the actual recurring payments which means you don't have to store credit card information on your servers or even do anything once the subscription is created through their APIs.
If your subscriptions will vary in terms of cost or frequency, you'll need to use a service like Authorize.Net's Customer Information Manager (CIM) to create payment profiles for your customers. Basically you're storing credit card information on Authorize.Net's servers and whenever you want to make a subscription payment you tell Authorize.Net to charge the amount due to that payment profile. The drawback to this is you essentially have to build your own subscription system.
You usually find the recurring billing features in middleware gateways like Payflow Pro. In that case, it is invoked by a variation of the API you use for card processing. You usually set up the time span between billings and they perform the billing. You usually then reconcile the billing with the report that your processor sends you each month. In some cases, the payment gateway will post a notification to you that the billing was performed. You still have to reconcile the payments with the processor report because sometimes the notifications fail.
Canceling the recurring billing is also another API call.
If your gateway doesn't have the recurring feature, you obviously have to set up the billing yourself. This of course leads to storing card info and so forth. In this case, you usually tell the processor that it is a recurring transaction (which the gateway will do for you) so you get a discount on the transaction fees.
First, let apend the statement above "...tell the processor that it is a recurring transaction ...so you get a discount on the transaction fees". The true cost of credit card processing is a percentage fee and a per item fee based on the type of card presented ( and some other factors I won't delve into here.) The point being, on a wholesale price plan, the price would be the same regardless of whether it was recurring or not because there are no special rates for 'recurring' in interchange. But I digress.
"Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing?"
Don't take on storing credit card data no matter what. You can't afford the liability.
The right choice depends on several factors.
As to credit card portability, has anyone gone to Wells Fargo/ First Data and gotten their data out? (Braintree ISO/MSP). I guarantee it won't be pretty no matter what so I would focus on the right long term solution, rather than the exit strategy, though it will certainly weigh in.
Here's questions that need to be answered:
How many transactions per month? For very low volume, maybe a few hundred, pick paypal pro. It's easy to get into/ out of.
Are people more likely to pay with consumer cards or business credit cards? Interchange optimization is important if business cards. (CenPOS automatically optimizes the transaction for lowest interchange qualification, paypal and authorize.net do not)
What methods does my client accept payments? self pay on internet only? Phone orders? Mobile payments (special events or retail)? Choose a gateway that fits all their needs.
Do you need to charge on specific days- ie the 1st and 15th? Or any time? If on specific days, how will you prorate? Check the answer against the gateway flexibility.
What happens when a card expires?
What happens when a transaction is declined?
Who will need to see the payment data for customer service? How will they access it?
Determine your needs, then figure out which ones meet them.
For the record, CenPOS is the most robust solution, but may require more steps to integrate since they are newer to ecommerce.
Disclaimer: I've been a business user of paypal and authorize.net for probably a decade and more recently CenPOS. I'm also an authorize.net reseller, and CenPOS direct agent.
Just a heads-up about Payflow Gateway's Recurring Billing:
Their Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) is a fantastic feature, but only applies to their legacy APIs. For the time being, THE ONLY WAY to be notified by PayPal of a successful (recurring) billing transaction, is by inquiry. You will need to maintain a schedule to inquire, and send an individual inquiry for each, scheduled recurring billing transaction, one at a time. PayPal will not notify you if, for example:
A transaction is approaching
A transaction has occurred
This transaction was successful
This transaction resulted in fault
A credit card is approaching expiration
A dispute occurred
... and so on.
In my opinion, this renders their service useless.
We are using PayPal subscriptions to automatically make ongoing monthly donations. The user initially creates a subscription with some pre-determined monthly donation amount (e.g., say $50/month). This creates a recurring subscription which we process by way of IPN. All good there. But, our interface allows the user to come in and change their monthly donation amount, say from $50/month to $100/month. I am wondering how I can change the PayPal subscription to reflect this new amount?
There is a method in PayPal's NVP API called "UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile" which says I can update the subscription amount, but unfortunately it says:
For recurring payments with Express Checkout, the payment amount can be increased by no more than 20% every 180 days (starting when the profile is created).
(reference: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_nvp_r_UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile)
To be honest, PayPal's API's are quite confusing so I'm not sure if I am using the Express Checkout or not. (We are creating Subscription buttons using the simple Website Payment Standard API).
Will this work? If not, is there an alternative to achieve what we need?
Thanks!
I'm not sure if I am using the Express Checkout or not. (We are creating Subscription buttons using the simple Website Payment Standard API).
I hope rereading the above, you will realize that you answered your own question: You are using Website Payments Standard (WPS) not Express Checkout (EC).
With WPS, you can create a subscription modify button but this is super inflexible and I would not recommend it.
With EC, you can modify subscriptions as well (page 99):
Use the UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile API to modify a recurring payments profile.
NOTE: You can also modify recurring payments profiles from the PayPal website.
You can only modify the following specific information about an active or suspended profile:
Subscriber name or address
Past due or outstanding amount
Whether to bill the outstanding amount with the next billing cycle
Maximum number of failed payments allowed
Profile description and reference
Number of additional billing cycles
Billing amount, tax amount, or shipping amount
NOTE: You cannot modify the billing frequency or billing period of a profile. You can
modify the number of billing cycles in the profile.
NOTE: For recurring payments with Express Checkout, certain updates, such as billing
amount, are not allowed within 3 days of the scheduled billing date, and an error is
returned.
You can modify the following profile information during the trial period or regular payment
period:
Billing amount (excluding tax and shipping)
Number of billing cycles
With that information out of the way... For the most flexibility:
Look at creating Billing Agreement IDs through Express Checkout. You will need to get Reference Transactions enabled on your PayPal account (talk to merchant support to get this done).
With a BAID, you control when your customers are charged, how much they are charged, and pretty much anything else having to do with the transaction. The drawback is the same as the benefit.. you (see 'have to') control it all.
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.