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I've been fighting with paypal's documentation for a few days and I have several doubts about how it could fit my needs.

In the site we are developing, we need to handle subscriptions, and we are going to sell items. In order to bill those items there are three cases:

1- The item can be sold with one-time payment method.

2- The item is going to be billed recurrently (once per month, per year, per week,...)

3- The item needs to be billed base on its usage (some kind of pay-as-you-go system)

I was considering to use "Recurring Payments with Express Checkout API" which aparently can handle this situation perfectly. Now, there is one problem. I understand Paypal sends notifications to the buyer, and to us, when the recurring payment occurs. This is ok for accounts's suscriptions, however, in the items case could be annoying for the client to have one notification for each item is going to be billed in the same period. For example, one buyer has 4 items which have to be billed every month on 25th. The desirable thing would be to have one notification with a summary of the items have been billed. Is this possible using Paypal Recurring Payments with Express Checkout API?

Thanks in advance!

Anne
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Your best option would be to use either Payflow Pro or Website Payments Pro and use reference transactions with each of those. The both would allow yout o process credit card transactions dierctly, and you could add recurring payments/recurring billig on as well if you wanted to set up a profile for the customer to be billed.

One problem that you would have if you use Express Checkout and you set up recurring payments, you can only increase the amount by a certain percentage. If you use reference transactoins you can process additional transactions without having to ask the customer for their billing details again.

Even if you didn't want to use the recurring billing/recurring payment system through PayPal, you could just use reference transactionis and set your system up to bill the buyers on a recurring basis using rference transactions.

PP_MTS_Chad
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  • Thank you very much!!! I will take a look to the documentation of the two products and, considering how painful and confusing those pages are for me, I'm quite sure I will come back here begging for help. – Anne May 17 '13 at 06:39
  • If I'm understanding the doc correctly, the reference transactions need a transaction ID, which is in the DoDirectPayment's call response. But Direct Payment doesn't enable us to accept payments from PayPal accounts ¿is this right? – Anne May 17 '13 at 09:08
  • Correct. If you want to accept payments from PayPal accounts, you can use Express Checkout. You can use reference transactions to process payments that were completed through Express Checkout as well. You set up a billing agreement with the customer in the initial Express Checkout session. This allows you to come back and perform a reference transaction API call for that buyer. – PP_MTS_Chad May 17 '13 at 14:39