Lets say customers have signed up for a free trial and should be charged only at the end of their trial period if they want to continue their service. I'm looking to do the following via PayPal's APIs:
Before storing their CC data, check to see if the card is valid
Create, Update, Delete, and Get credit card information on PayPal
Also link a user's CC data to their username or ID on my system
Store CC data but bill the customers later (needed for a trial application)
Are these doable on PayPal?
You cannot do some of the above features in PayPal.
Here is what you can do in PayPal.
First option - DoReferenceTransactionReq (charge time and amount can be vary)
1) Charge customer's credit card first (let say $5)
2) Save that transaction id
3) Reference that transaction id for next billing (do not need credti card again)
Second option - CreateRecurringPaymentsProfileReq (Recurrening time and amount are fixed)
1) Create recurrent profile based on time (Eg. day, week, year)
2) PayPal will bill customer's account automatically
Authorize.Net also has same feature called CIM (Customer Information Manager). It is more easier to store/access user profiles and payment profiles. Besides, you do not need to charge customer's credit card first.
Related
I have a white labeling Shopify app that bills store owners who install my app whenever orders for my vendor are created in their store. Currently I use Authorize.net as a payment processor. Store owners perform an initial setup whereby they authorize their credit card using a web form I provide. This provides me with a customer profile ID and a customer payment profile ID for the store owner, and I use these two ids to charge their credit card via Authorize.Net for each and every order that is placed through their store for when the order contains one or more of my white label products.
So essentially I have Authorize.Net tokens for each store, and I use those tokens to charge store owners' credit cards as orders come in through their store, and each order has a different charge amount (this is not a recurring payment that is of the same amount each time). Here is some sample code.
I'd like to use PayPal as a backup payment processor and reproduce this same functionality. I'm looking through PayPal's API as well as the Node SDK, and I am not sure how to accomplish the same thing with PayPal. I essentially want to obtain a token tied to the store owner's account which I can use to charge the seller for each order, and each order can have a different charge amount.
Can someone point me in the right direction?
Turns out that what I wanted seems to be Reference Transactions.
For documentation see https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECReferenceTxns/.
For an example see this project which uses the paypal-ec2 Node package.
The flow for the example project mentioned above appears to be as follows:
Create Billing Agreement with seller
Visit Express Checkout page
http://localhost:3000/checkout/callback_success is called
Receive token
Redirect to payment URL (which uses token received)
Receive token
Create a billing agreement
(no redirection or confirmation happens)
Receive and store a billing agreement token in database
You now have the ability to process payments in the future for arbitrary transaction amounts using the Billing Agreement ID
We require reference transactions via PayPal to bill customers monthly with varying amounts.
e.g. first month is $30, second month may be $35, third month may be $25 etc
So far this seems to be the best approach: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECReferenceTxns/
I am using the PayPal recommended SDK from this page: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/nvpsoap-sdks/
and using the ExpressCheckout Method. (paypal/merchant-sdk-php installed via composer)
We have a free PayPal business account.
Testing via Sandbox I am able to:
Get a token (SetExpressCheckout) - category->Digital, billingAgreement, Type=Sale
forward customer to sandbox paypal login
Confirm the payment
redirect back to our system (returnUrl)
Process the payment (GetExpressTocket + doExpressCheckout)
Questions:
Does the PayPal business account require any switch/status/upgrade to enable Reference transactions on the live environment?
How do you setup a $0 billing agreement to invoice an amount later in the month? When passing a 0 amount in step 1 above and error is displayed
Item name, amount and quantity are required if item category is
provided, ErrorCode 10003
This contradicts to documentation https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECReferenceTxns/#setting-up-a-billing-agreement-before-payment which states to set the amount to 0...?
UPDATE: Removing the setting $itemDetails->ItemCategory = 'Digital'; solved the $0 amount issue.
Billing ID is not returned even though I've passed the BillingAgreement data
// Billing agreement details
$billingAgreementDetails = new BillingAgreementDetailsType('MerchantInitiatedBillingSingleAgreement');
$billingAgreementDetails->BillingAgreementDescription = $billingAgreementTxt;
$setECReqDetails->BillingAgreementDetails = array($billingAgreementDetails);
I know there are a few questions within the post but I believe they are all related to the scope of 'Reference Transactions' within PayPal.
I'm looking for recommendations on approach and explanations to the contradictions in documentation. (or if I'm doing something wrong then happy to hear it)
To answer your question:
1) Does the PayPal business account require any switch/status/upgrade to enable Reference transactions on the live environment?
If you are receive an error when calling for Reference Transaction, probably that the setting is turned off in your account. You will need to contact PayPal Business Support team to enable it.
2) Billing ID is not returned.
To setup billing agreement, you will need to pass paymentaction=authorization in SetExpressCheckout request. You will not be able to setup billing agreement if you set the paymentaction as sale.
I need to create one agreement with user where user need to pay amount for example "75$" (it will dynamic) . User create recurring profile with one time in the future.
Do you mean the amount of charge will be differ on each cycle? If that is the case, you might need to use Billing Agreement with Reference Transaction.
No specific amount on each charge, no expiry date and also you can charge your buyer in future without having them login to their PayPal account.
Read here.
I’m building a site to be based in Australia and I have been researching into saving credit card numbers. Currently I have not had much luck with my questions. Paypal was of little help.
The site will run on many small transactions. I plan on using the paypal gateway to handle payment both via credit card and paypal accounts.
What I would like to do is retrieve user’s credit card details so they do not need to input them each time.
How I imagine this to work is that the first time a customer will input their credit card details to make the purchase. Once this purchase has been completed the site will receive a transaction ID from paypal. I then save this ID for future reference mapped to the users ID or email address.
So the next time the user wishes to make a purchase via their credit card I can forward this transaction ID to paypal and it can already have all the fields populated with their card details. Or display a screen with the last 4 digits or similar and ask the user if they wish to use this card again.
This is all assuming that the user does not have a paypal account.
Is this possible? Is there a better/more cost effective solution than this?
Your understanding isn't too far off. When you submit card details to PayPal (or any payment gateway) you should get back a token id. You would store that token id instead of the card details, then at any future point you wish to take payment you submit the token id (along with payment value etc)
By only storing the token value (and not the card details) you free yourself of most of the hassle with PCI compliance. PCI does allow you to store part of the card details in plain text (at most the first six and last four digits), so you could safely store these along with your token id. That would allow you to display these details and ask 'use this card again'
An example of this is documented at PayPal's site here:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/direct/store-a-credit-card/
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.