Looking for some advice on which service to use to implement the following on my site:
I would like to sell 4 levels of subscriptions each to be billed on a monthly basis
The customer should be able to cancel their subscription at any time
The customer should be able to upgrade and downgrade their subscription at any time
I would like to keep the cost down until I have enough subscribers.
I have looked at Paypal but could not figure out how I can do requirements #3. Posting to their community forums yielded no response.
I am also located in Canada which seems to limit the options available to me.
I am currently looking at www.preedly.com and www.chargify.com but they seem to require a merchant account so I'd end up paying 2 service providers.
My site is written in PHP so a PHP-friendly solution is needed.
One last thing, I could not find a way to get Paypal to tell me the new subscription expiry date (following the successful processing of a transation) in order for me to update my customer table and lock out those who have not paid.
You may want to look into gettings a US based merchant account (I used to work for a merchant account provider and we were able to successfully establish merchant account for Canadian businesses. IIRC it required some hoops to be jumped through, though). If you can get a US merchant account you then can use Authorize.Net's Automated Recurring Billg (ARB) API. It allows you to create subscriptions and modify them accordingly (upadting and deleting).
Related
I am currently upgrading an old system writing in JSF, which communicates with Paypal to create an "Acceptance term" for recurring payment, it generates a Token and when the client accepts the term, it creates an Agreement Id, later we use these to charge the client based on the services he used.
On the Paypal developer website, the Billing Agreement API is marked as deprecated, so I can´t work with it, they offer the Subscription as an alternative, but it doesn´t give the Agreement Id or the possibility to charge the user based on the usage, at least, not that I´ve seen.
Is there a way to create the Token and Agreement, or to use the Subscription (or other methods) to charge the user based on that?
eg. We offer a mobile plan for U$ 10, plus U$ 5 if the user sends more than 1000 messages, we first check if that happened, then we charge the user.
If the account is approved for reference transactions, and it sounds like it may be, you can use the Vault API which is in open beta, in conjunction with the orders API. See this example.
I have created shopify app and setting up billing Api. In the App, I want to apply trial period of 20 days. I have created the charge during the app installation and send customers to confirmation url so that they can accept or decline the charge.. So I want to know that if customer decline the payment charge, then can he uses the app featurs till trial period?
If a customer declines the subscription, you still get the confirmation URL callback. Examine the charge. The status will say declined. At this point you can kill off their DB token and destroy their session. This will ensure they cannot use your App as they declined the terms.
It is one bad aspect of the whole billing scenario. I have lots of customers that are faced with a question they don't read. So they assume the trial you offer for free is activated by declining the subscription. Silly customers... still cannot operate the Internet :)
I need suggestion for paypal pro API which allow me to pass variable amount each month. For some months,it can be zero too.
I tried with UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile but it gives me error of 11592 (Subscription profiles are not supported for recurring payments).
Please someone help me with easiest solution.
Based on the error you mentioned it sounds like you're using a PayPal Standard Subscription button, not Pro. If that's the case, then as the error says, you cannot update standard subscriptions with the APIs. You would have to use the recurring payments API to create the profile in order to then update it.
That said, you won't be able to do variable amounts with recurring payments profiles. you can only raise them by 10% every 120 days, so that typically doesn't work with what you're trying to do.
Instead, you'll need to use reference transactions. So if you're using Payments Pro that will be real simple. You just pass in the transaction ID of an original authorization or sale transaction along with a new amount you need to charge. PayPal uses the card details on file to process the new amount.
If you're using DoDirectPayment then you'll use DoReferenceTransaction for the future payments. If you're using PayFlow you would use the PayFlow API, of course, and change the parameters to match a reference transaction request.
You can also do the same thing with PayPal Express Checkout, but in that case you'll need to include billing agreement parameters in the SetExpressCheckout request, and then you'd use the billing agreement ID you get back from that in the DoReferenceTransaction request.
In any case you'll need to build your own script to run everyday, pull profiles that need to be charged, and charge them accordingly.
Evening
I have a client who is asking to build an eCommerce tool in which multiple stores are able to create accounts and their products in order to sell them via a web app.
This is not like any regular eCommerce sites since we are working with multiple stores each one of them with an unique bank account.
The quick solution is to ask the stores users to give me the bank account and all extra sensitive information and do the transaction via coding my self... but i don't want to mess with such delicate data that is why im looking for some service that helps me do that.
I know that i can use auth net to build something like that but my main client will have to pay for each of those merchant accounts, which is not a very good option.
Any of you had the chance to work in something like this before? Can you tell me which services you used? Would be extraordinary to use the same payment gateway to do everything but i am probably asking for too much...
Waiting for answers, thanks in advance
You definitely don't want to be storing bank information and card data if you are not Level 1 PCI compliant. There is a lot of financial liability if you do so.
There is a company called Base Commerce (www.basecommerce.com) which allows developers such as yourself to create a 'partner' account and associate multiple merchant accounts under it. You can spin up or down as many accounts as you want, all programatically, at no cost (except for the small % transaction fees that are normal in payment processing). You will also get commissions on the transactions your merchants process.
I have a situation where I am to bill the site users monthly. But the invoice amount that is raised depends on the the leads that our site generates for his business. For example if the user gets 5 leads from my site and I charge him $10 per lead, at the end of month he will be charged $50. similarly leads might vary each month so will the amount.
Now I cant store his cc/ paypal credentials on my site for security reasons nor can I pre bill him or ask him to take credits and then use it. Please let me know the way to handle this situation. How can I handle this using paypal?
There are a few different ways to handle this, but I would recommend Preapproved Payments, which are part of the Adaptive Payments API.
With this method your users would create a profile with you (using the Preapproval API) when they first create their account on your site. That will give you a preapproval key that you can store with your user account. Then in the future when you need to bill them you can use the Pay API with the preapproval key to process funds immediately without further approval.
If you're working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make these calls very simple for you. You would just use the Preapproval.php template to setup the profiles for people, and then use PayWithOptions.php to process payments using the preapproval key(s) accordingly.
If you end up using it and need more help you can contact me directly for support.