Is it possible to use PayPal's preapproved payments api for the following scenario:
Online marketplace where users buy fixed amounts of credits.
They spend the credits on items/services in the marketplace.
We detect when the credits run out and based on the billing agreement automatically charge them to renew the amount of credits.
I have spent quite a while looking around for an answer to this but cannot find my specific problem.
Any help very much appreciated! Thanks.
Yes this is definitely possible. I would write a cron job that periodically checks current credits against their billing agreement. If there is a match, then make a pay request to paypal. Sorry I cannot provide code examples without more knowledge of how your site is structured.
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I'm planning for my new application, and its contain payment method, after research on google, im found google pay will be better one.
but how google pay will deducts the amount from the user and tranfer it to my bank number?
is their any proccess or third part ?
Best Regards and thanks.
Google Pay does not actually process the payment. It facilitates it by securely transmitting the user's selected payment method to a payment processor.
A list of supported payment processors can be found at https://developers.google.com/pay/api/#participating-processors.
Instructions on how to integrate with the relevant payment processors can be found by following the processor links.
I am sorry if this wasn't a good place to ask a question like this, but since I always got help from Stackoverflow I though I could get some answer to my problem.
So here is the thing, I am building a e-commerce website like many famous websites over there, where you can make bid offers for items on the market.
The thing I want to be sure is that when someone place a bid for some item, they can not turn back on their word, because if they get accepted the money should be withdrawn from their bank accounts, do you get what I mean?
Because I want the merchant to be safe if they accept a offer they want the money, and they don't want to look for another legit offer.
So how can I accomplish this?
Should I ask the credit card details when they make the bid offer and only make the withdraw operation from their accounts if the their offer was accepted by the merchant? [using some automated trigger on my database of course]
If this is not the best practice to accomplish this, which is the one??
I am really new into payment methods and I just started doing my search for Payment Gateways (maybe they offer me this functionality... I don't know?!)
You should never store credit card details, and have the details is not really any guarantee of getting paid since the card could just be canceled.
What you are probably looking for is for Authorization and delayed capture (depending on the timeline you are looking at). Different payment processors have different time requirements around how long you can hold an authorization. In general you would make a request with the API to Authorize the charges (kind of like a 'hold' on your credit card) and then later you would either cancel or Capture, where the funds would be transferred. See more info about the process and Square's API here: https://docs.connect.squareup.com/articles/delayed-capture-transactions/
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.
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'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.