I'm trying to find a payment provider that allows me to process variable subscription payments - I have an SaaS offering which is to be charged for on the usage of it, so the monthly costs will be variable.
E.g I could have to bill:
Jan Fab
User 1 £10 £15
User 2 £25 £20
Initially I thought that paypal would be ok with their automatic payments, but it does not appear you can update the billing amounts via the API - something that is fairly key.
It seems that Authorize.Net would do the trick, or any other processor, but the catch is I dont have an internet merchant account at the minute - and don't really want to have to sort on until things are off the ground.
I have also had a look at Sassy, http://saasy.com/, but this doesn't allow variable monthly billing - only ondemand "top ups".
Any suggestions on providers, or should I look to switch to a "credit" / "topup" model?
I see 2 options:
Use PayPal Recurring Billing and just alter the recurring billing profile before it charges each month. Sort of a pain and there is definitely room for error here. Not the best option IMO.
Use Reference Transactions with PayPal. You would build your own recurring billing logic and essentially just charge the customer what you need to each billing period.
Since you are in UK, you could use PayPal Payments Pro, BraintreePayments or Stripe (in beta) & build your own recurring billing logic on top. Or you could get one of these gateways & use it in a plug-&-play ready recurring solution.
Recurly
ChargeBee
Chargify
Disclosure: I am a Co-founder of ChargeBee.
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 setting up a site where users can subscribe on a yearly basis.
I have it complete through the payment pro api but completely missed the charges.
If i understand it correctly, its £20 a month for pro and £20 a month for repeat billing.
Is this correct?
To create a subscription site, is paypal pro my only option ? does paypal offer other, cheaper options?
Really confused with their site and information.
You could use PayPal Website Payments Standard and use subscription buttons. There is no monthly charge for this service. The only charge would be a transaction fee for each transaction or subscription charge.
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.
My business is setting up online billing using PayPal and Google checkout. I'm looking for the best way to charge a recurring monthly service fee for my website. My site is subscription based and I charge X amount of dollars per month. I want to bill the customer's credit card each month for that monthly fee. The subscriber to the site knows that it is an ongoing monthly service charge when they sign up.
I'm looking for the quickest, easiest, best, most reliable way to charge this recurring fee.
I'd prefer to have the monthly fee just show up on their monthly credit card statement like it does on mine for many services I use like Slicehost.
NOTE: Google checkout now DOES support recurring payments -- they just implemented it!
Google Checkout doesn't currently support recurring billing, but it is on their Feature Suggestions page.
PayPal supports Recurring Payments either manually or through their API.
I'd highly recommend using PayPal's API, as it's straightforward, well documented, and you can easily test everything out on your non-production sites by using PayPal's Developer Site.
Goole Checkout now supports "Recurring charges and subscriptions" in beta mode
There's more info at Google's site
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.