paypal verifying first payment or initamt was billed in recurring payment

Question

I want my users to be able to subscribe to a recurring payment (using the express checkout api) The first payment needs to be billed immediately that the user subscribes, and I need to know that they have been successfully billed before granting them access.

Is there a straight forward way to do this?

I've tried, creating a recurring payment profile with an INITAMT set, however, it's not clear that the user is being billed (when using the sandbox), and there is no txn_id (or the equivalent) being returned to suggest that billing has been done. I do get an IPN confirmation however that comes "some time" after creating the profile, which makes it difficult to offer a great user experience.

I've tried adding a one time payment, authenticating that with DoExpressCheckoutPayment, then setting up the recurring profile if the one-off payment works, however the Authentication also fails and at this points I've given up (although there may still be some legs in this approach).

Anyway, I thought I'd ask the experts here. Is there a simple way to setup a recurring payment, one payment per month, first payment billed now() and have the first payment confirmed via the API without having to wait an unknown amount of time for an IPN confirmation message?

Answer 1

This can be done as you require, I've tested it and it works. The key is that you need to process both a standard digital goods payment as well as a recurring payment using the same Express Checkout flow, i.e. The user will be asked to pay a once-off, as well as approve a subscription. You would want to set the s

1. Follow the instructions for setting up the payment: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/express-checkout/ht_ec-basicDigGoodsPayment-curl-etc/

2. Add the fields specified for recurring payment: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/express-checkout/ht_ec-recurringPaymentProfile-curl-etc/

3. Process 'DoExpressCheckoutPayment' and if successful, 'CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile' with a start date of your first 'renewal' date.

You should now have both transaction id for the one-off payment, as well as a profile id for the recurring payment.

Answer 2

I would stick to your first option of using INITAMT to process the first payment, but set FAILEDINITAMTACTION to CancelOnFailure.

This way, if the initial payment is not successful, the profile will immediatly be set to Suspended status instead of Active.

Then, within your login system or whatever you're using to protect your subscriber content, you can use GetRecurringPaymentsProfileDetails to obtain the current status of the subscription profile. If it's anything other than "Active" you can give the user a message accordingly and deny them access to the content.

Answer 3

When the profile is first created, PayPal sends an IPN named "recurring_payment_profile_created". This IPN contains a field "initial_payment_txn_id". You can use GetTransactionDetails to look up this ID and determine whether that transaction is Completed. Ensure that you mark that transaction ID as processed so that your code doesn't double-ship if/when the IPN for that transaction is sent (if that is relevant to you). This example is similar to how we approach this in our IPN listener (written in Ruby against PayPal's official Merchant SDK gem):

case params[:txn_type]
  when 'recurring_payment_profile_created'
    # The profile has been created.  Perform any action, if necessary...

    initial_txn = params[:initial_payment_txn_id]
    return if ProcessedTransaction.exists?(initial_txn)

    request = api.build_get_transaction_details({
        :TransactionID => initial_txn
    })

    resp = api.get_transaction_details(request)
    if resp.success? and resp.PaymentTransactionDetails.PaymentInfo.PaymentStatus == 'Completed'
        # The initial payment is completed, perform the action...
        # Add this ID to your ProcessedTransaction table so you don't double-process...
    end
  # other 'when' statements for other transaction types, etc go here
end

Answer 4

The only solution I've found (which is poor) is to accept up to a 24 hour delay in being notified that the first month's subscription has been billed. We're now investigating Google checkout and braintree payments as alternatives to paypal so we can migrate away from it.