I have gone through nearly all the question related to Recurring Payment using Paypal and have not found a solution to my problem.
We are implementing a system that is subscription based on a monthly basis (fixed amount). We do not want to store CC details for security reasons, hence we are trying to use Website Payments Pro from Paypal.
Once a user agrees to recurring payments, we are creating a RecurringPaymentProfile for that user and are storing the returned Profile_Id for the user.
Now we need to get information about all the transactions related to this Recurring Profile_Id. This information is available when we login to the Paypal account but this needs to be automated so that the application is aware of all the payments and also of the current subscription of the user.
We have found two methods (possibly) to implement this.
1. IPN (Instant Payment Notification, for this we will have to create a service to listen to notifications, which seems to be cumbersome and is more informational than we require)
2. TransactionSearch (but this returns transactions for the Paypal account and not Profile_Id)
Since we just want to know the transaction history associated with the Recurring Profile and whether this months payment was successful (implying the user is active member), what is the best method to implement this ?
Thanks,
You're looking for the GetRecurringPaymentsProfileDetails API Operation. This operation will allow you to view a majority of the details associated with a recurring payment profile using a valid PROFILEID.
Relevant detail fields you may be interested in:
LASTPAYMENTDATE
The date of the last successful payment received for
this profile, in YYYY-MM-DD format.
LASTPAYMENTAMT
The amount of the last successful payment received for this profile.
FAILEDPAYMENTCOUNT
The total number of failed billing cycles for this profile.
NEXTBILLINGDATE
The next scheduled billing date, in YYYY-MM-DD format.
NUMCYCYLESCOMPLETED
The number of billing cycles completed in the
current active subscription period. A billing cycle is considered
completed when payment is collected or after retry attempts to collect
payment for the current billing cycle have failed.
Related
I'm not a developer, but a project manager. So please excuse my lack of proper language.
We are trying to figure out how to handle subscription refunds and then limit account access on the site.
Here's a scenario. Member signs up for an annual subscription to gain certain capabilities in the account. 3 months into it member decides to cancel and requests a refund. Normally, if no refund is issued, subscription is good until the end of the billing period, at which point account is deactivated.
In our case, if a refund is issued, account should be deactivated immediately. Question: is it possible to set this up as part of PayPal Subscriptions? Some type of call from PayPal to our system that will trigger account deactivation.
Thank you.
We recommend using IPN (Instant Payment Notifications) to be asynchronously notified of any events, in this case of those related to existing subscription/recurring payments.
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/ipn/gs_IPN/
If you enable IPN notifications you will receive a POST of PayPal in the following events (among others):
When a recurring profile is cancelled.
When a refund has been made to a previous completed transaction.
This way, you can set up your IPN script to keep the subscription “open” in your side for the remainder of the month even if the profile has been cancelled, or to deactivate it if the last month has been refunded.
For more information about IPN variables:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNandPDTVariables/
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.
Here is the scenario:
on 25/3 user purchases a basic monthly subscription (recurring payment profile)
on 7/4 user cancels basic monthly subscription and start a premium monthly subscription (a different recurring payment profile)
Now my question is whether I am going to receive a "subscr_eot" on the 25/4 (referring to the first basic monthly subscription) or is PayPal smart enough not to send subscr_eot since the user has started a new recurring payment profile with me?
I would like to set the user profile to "no subscription" as soon as I get a "subscr_eot", but I am not sure whether I can trust PayPal to notice that a new subscription was started between cancellation and end_of_term.
If it's canceled then the end of term was never reached. In such a case you'd get an IPN with txn_type=subscr_cancel. You would then get another IPN with txn_type=subscr_signup when the new profile is created.
That is assuming you're using standard subscriptions. You specifically mentioned subscr_eot, so that's why I made that assumption. However, you also mentioned "recurring payment profile". The Recurring Payments API is separate from standard subscriptions and would have different txn_type values for IPN, so if that's what you're actually using you'll need to adjust accordingly.
I am writing a subscription where I need to provide users a month trial and charge $5.00 after trial is finished. I just found an amazing code to do that for me.
I also have setup paypalpro plus recurring payments
This is the link
https://github.com/krio/paypal-recurring-subscriptions
Questions:
1- How to make first month Free Trial?
2- I need to update users billing and update their payment in my database so it can calculate their subscription, how would i get to call from paypal to my files to update?
If you are using subscriptions and you are wanting to make the first month a free trial, you would need to pass over the following variables and values.
a1=0
p1=1
t1=M
You can find a description of all of the variables for subscriptions here.
If you are wanting to get updates back to your system/database to update your profiles and etc, you can use IPN to do this. Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a message service that notifies you of events related to PayPal transactions. You can use it to automate back-office and administrative functions, such as fulfilling orders, tracking customers, and providing status and other information related to a transaction.
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.