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.
Related
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.
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/
Is there a way to create postpaid subscription with paypal ? Basically what I want is to charge some amount at the end of the month from user paypal account.
That amount of money depends on how much minutes he spend on our service during that month...
With Payments Standard Subscriptions you can't change the amount billed. Using Recurring Payments through Express Checkout you're able to change the amount but only by 20%.
If you set up a billing agreement through Express Checkout you can use the Reference Transaction API calls to bill a customer whatever amount you need to. There are additional features that need to be enabled on an account to allow you to use Reference Transactions.
In the SetExpressCheckout call you define the billing agreement terms and when you submit the DoExpressCheckoutPayment API call you define the exact same billing terms that you included in the first API call.
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.