I'm looking for a way to allow our clients to do recurring payments to discount these payments based on the credit in their account which can be earned or deposited in many ways. For example, if they need to pay $20 and have $5 in credit, I would like to only bill the remaining $15 automatically without any need for additional website visits.
Looking at the documentation for PayPal's REST APIs, I don't see any clear way to do this. Is the only way to do this to send them a refund automatically? Or is there a way to get approved to bill clients up to X amount per month but allow us to bill under that amount. I thought billing agreements would allow for this, but after reading the documentation, I'm unable to figure out a way to do it. If it's possible, could someone walk me through what API calls would be needed to do this?
Thanks for any help you can offer.
There are a couple of different ways you could do this sort of thing, but I would avoid the REST API for now. It's still too new and doesn't provide as much functionality and features as the classic API.
Within the classic API, you can use either use Preapproved Payments, which consists of Preapproval and Pay APIs, or you could just use Express Checkout and/or Payments Pro with Reference Transactions.
Either way you'd basically be building your own recurring payments system where you'd setup a billing agreement and then your app would trigger the variable amount payments accordingly.
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I need to know how to detect recurring payments in shopify, so that when a recurring payment happens, perform an action.
In what part of shopify can I detect it, in the code, database?
Thank you for you help.
There are no recurring payments or subscriptions in Shopify at this time. External Apps are used to fake that, so you'd be looking at how they work, and interacting with them to determine recurring payments.
If you mean recurring charges for Apps you make, there is an API endpoint you call that will tell you everything you want to know with a GET. As per the docs, see here:
https://help.shopify.com/en/api/reference/billing/recurringapplicationcharge
New here and i hope i am in the right place to ask my question. We are having problem with submitting our app to Shopify App Store.
We have an app where people can create their own designs on our physical products and sell. So we can produce their products and dropship to their customers. There are many apps to that.
Problem is they forcing us to use Billing API for our product charges. They take 20% of commission which our margin is not that much. We are wholesaler and we our margin is super low. We use (well we were planing to use) Stripe for products charges, which is 2.9 % commission.
And Shopify Apps Team member is keep asking me my margin, and says: "We are requiring that all apps use the billing API, but I might be able to make an exception since it seems like your business model isn't compatible. If an exception is made, you will be required to sign a revenue share agreement based on your margins"
All other App (in our business line)they charge their customers with 3th party payment processors and i have spoken with some of them they say they never heard about it and they don't share any revenue (apart from membership fees) with Shopify.
Any idea about this?
Thank you so much for you help.
Shopify is charging 20% of the cost of the app not 20% of the cost of your finished products. I don't know if your app can be free and still in the app store but from what you have written free would work since you will actually make your money on the goods. Just bill normally for the orders you receive
Before jumping in I'd like to know what all of my options are, and, if possible their pros and cons.
The two I know of are using ActiveMerchant, or the paypal_recurring gem, but will they satisfy these requirements?
Ability to accommodate monthly and annual billing
Ability to suspend, cancel accounts etc
Deal with out-of-date card details or failed payments
The to-do list for the paypal_recurring gem includes 'adding support for IPN' - how will not having this impact functionality?
I know there is the railskit SaaS but I'd rather code something myself as the railskit is still on 3.2.1.
I know there are services like cheddergedder/chargify etc, but do they tie you in? Are they US only? Are they worth considering - or are they usually just aimed at non-developers?
Thanks in advance.
I just finished going through this, so I'll try to shed some light on your options. I ended up using Paypal Express Checkout for all recurring purchases through Paypal. We had a custom-rolled recurring billing setup that charges a customer's credit card monthly through Authnet, but had to switch because we needed an international solution, and Paypal was one of the only ones that supported the currencies we needed, and wasn't entirely a nightmare to code.
You can use ActiveMerchant for recurring billing with this plugin, though keep in mind that it is not officially a part of ActiveMerchant, and therefore is subject to break if ActiveMerchant changes how it handles certain things. Because of that, I ended up using the paypal-recurring to handle communication through Paypal, and then rolled my own IPN parser, with help from Railscasts. Another link that helped me a lot was this, though all the :txn_type values ended up being different.
With regards to that last link, here are the 4 :txn_types that I specifically watch out for:
express_checkout - first postback.
recurring_payment_profile_created - sent on first postback when the user first subscribes.
recurring_payment_profile_cancel - sent if user cancels subscription from Paypal's site.
recurring_payment - Money has been transferred to your account. This is what I wait for before I renew their subscription on a monthly. This post also comes with payment_status, which needs to be completed.
The other stuff you mentioned, like handling failed payments and out-of-date cards, is handled through your Paypal account.
Just a word of warning - the only reason I ended up using Paypal is because it is universally recognized and trusted, and it accepted international currencies. There is an enormous amount of documentation on their site, and most of it is redundant, confusing, and entirely too long. My recommendation is to make sure you really want/need to deal with recurring payments, as they are difficult to implement correctly and can be more trouble than they're worth.
I'm currently looking at Ryan Bates example of Stripe. They are a California based company that uses/offers the features you have listed.
www.stripe.com
They only charge when you receive money. I think that they are 3% plus $0.30 per successful transaction. Much better than some other companies that have a monthly minimum. Right now you have to have a bank in the USA to use their services as a merchant. However, anyone can use your site with out of the country credit cards.
The SaaS Kit is now tested with Rails 3.2.2. :) It doesn't support IPN yet, but it's on to the todo list. With all the info here in one spot, I suppose I have no excuse not to get it done. :)
I'm building a marketplace application:
The customer pays the seller on the marketplace
The marketplace takes a cut of the payment
I would have a payment processing system with the following features
The cut and the 100%-cut are sent directly to the marketplace and seller accounts (ie, I don't want to have 100% on the marketplace account and then to forward the 100%-cut to the seller)
I would love to have a UI as much integrated with the marketplace website as possible. This implies that the customer in the worst case has to put only name, surname and credit card number on the payment processor interface (the ideal would be a payment interface totally integrated with our website)
I don't want to force the customer to register to any third party service
It should work nicely with Ruby on Rails
It should work for non US-based companies and should support multicurrency payments
What are the options out there?
Thanks.
I'd recommend you look at our product Balanced. It's built to solve exactly this problem so I think it's a good match.
At a high level payments in are done via credit card like a normal payment processor, funds are deposited into an escrow account which is a sum of all funds collected - all funds disbursed. When you're ready to push funds out you can currently pay out via next-day ACH (US only) but we're building out international support which sounds like it would be useful for you.
I believe it matches your other requirements:
there is no requirement to send users offsite, they do require accounts but you can create and edit them via the API.
Balanced has an excellent ruby gem
You can split up the payment, taking a cut from the proceeds as profit
Balanced provides you with a merchant dashboard for you and your customers to get a head start but you can build the exact same thing via API access.
One area where it's not going to meet your requirements is multi-currency charges. Currently you'll need to charge in USD and convert.
Check out https://github.com/drhenner/ror_ecommerce It doesn't have all the features you want but will give you a big head start.
Basically active merchant will connect to most gateways. You need to add the custom code. Look at the video for more help http://ror-e.com/info/videos/1
I've written a subscription based web app that I want to charge (by credit card) a monthly fee. There are 3 different plans and once they sign up, they should be billed that amount, automatically, every month until they cancel. Is there an easy way to set this up (some sort of online service maybe?).
You can use Paypal's merchant service to provide reoccurring charges for a subscription.
Pretty easy to implement, they provide plenty of examples and even a sandbox to get you up and running.
There are now some service providers that take care of your billing and subscription needs. You use their API and they handle billing and subscriptions for you. Their services work with payment systems like PayPal and Authorize.Net.
Take a look at the following sites:
Chargify
Spreedly
Cheddargetter
I would suggest not using Paypal or Authorize's recurring payments directly. Their APIs are brutal, and the functionality is very rudimentary. It may work fine for when you're just starting out, but if you ever want to change anything down the line, you'll be in trouble.
I work for CheddarGetter, so I'm biased, but you should check us out.
Our competitors are not as robust or flexible, but they are definitely better than using Paypal or Authorize.net directly.