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Automatic billing with Paypal
Until now I've been using Xero for invoicing and accounting, and Paypal for payments. When a Paypal payment arrives, Xero sees this and asks me to match it off against something, i.e. an invoice if there is one. This works great for the services I offer at the moment, where volume is quite low but the average payment amount is about £100.
I've been working on a new platform that I'll be offering in a few days. Initially it will be a free beta but I want to start thinking beyond that point. Volume will be higher but the amounts might be as low as about £3. I still want to use Xero for accounting and Paypal (Standard) for payments but I need a way of keeping track of who has paid their monthly bill and who has not.
At this point, you're probably thinking about at least one of the many available billing systems - WHMCS, Blesta etc. They're ok in some ways - and very cost effective - but I have one more requirement: I want variable automatic billing with Paypal Standard ("Automatic Payments"). Paypal have enabled this on my account, meaning that when someone clicks on my button, signs in and accepts the billing agreement, I can charge them up to the agreed maximum at some point every month. This means that they don't have to remember/bother to pay manually each month, but equally, if they want to upgrade/downgrade at some point, my system can handle it without dealing with Paypal again.
Does anyone know of a system - download or hosted - that can work with Paypal Automatic Payments? If not, does anyone know which API I need to use, or if there's another way to handle this sort of billing?
PS: Stripe, Braintree and Paymill are not good alternatives because of the difficulties I've had dealing with them.
Comments
I've been playing around with this exact thing in my panel I've developed. I should have a beta version of this available within the coming months. As for existing modules which offer, I don't know off by hand.
Interesting and certainly a useful idea, would save a bunch of headaches. No idea of a solution that implements this, but would be interested to hear of anything that others know to work with this method of billing.
+1.
The only solution I found that I'll probably be using: https://recurly.com/. If you ask them, they can provide full support for Paypal "reference transactions".
It's expensive but if you take the time to try it out and speak to their support guys you'll understand why - and it has more features than the website suggests in terms of customer management, integrations, gateways, reporting and exporting etc.
I also re-looked at Braintree having tried to sign up a year ago and where my account still hadn't been activated after 2 months. They've improved a lot and I'd now feel comfortable using them as a Paypal "alternative". Also, no transaction fees on the first £30k.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECReferenceTxns/
API is available for that. I guess the above link should provide you with proper information required.
You forgot to offer him your services in integrating the API for him.
Im having exams so I cant dedicate time towards any project right now well vacations will be a good time for me to sit down and complete a few whmcs modules.
Invoice Daddy - $5/m or Invoice Bus $30/m?
Haven't used either so cant be sure but both have free trials to give them a go.
The API call is actually not that difficult to implement. The hardest part is getting authorisation to use reference transactions from paypal. After that, the rest is just using the classic recurring payment API and adding "MerchantInitiatedBilling" as the "L_BILLINGTYPEn" type and then you just keep charging the customer to the transaction reference you get back from paypal.
@BharatB link has all details.
Of course you will need to do the work to develop it or pay some to :-)
Look at loadingdeck..I really don't think he'll have to worry about "paying" someone to program it for him.
The missing link for me was that what's called "automatic billing" in the Paypal GUI is (I think) called "reference transactions" in the API. Armed with that knowledge I could develop something myself or even make a small adaptation to code I wrote for Paypal months ago.
However this is part of a larger project and I don't just need payment integration - I also need a way of keeping track of who has signed up, cancelled, how much people are paying, how much it adds up to every month, where people are based, trials, coupons, invoices etc. and then using an existing system seems to make more sense.
Recurly looks good because it is designed exactly for this type of business and does all of the above. The billing side and UI are a lot better than WHMCS et al but obviously there is no cPanel integration (not that I need that).
And to be honest, if you need cPanel integration it's a lot easier to code a quick customized cPanel deployment script using their api than it is to create and modify a billing system to work well with all the features you just described.
Edit: Btw what happened to LoadingDeck billing? I remember wanting to check it out. It appears it's gone now
It was a Composer-based project and relied on now-outdated packages. In a nutshell there was no way anyone who wasn't a Symfony developer with a lot of time would be able to get it working. It's a real shame because an awful lot of time and money went into it (although if I were to start again, there would be several things I'd do differently).
Try ReliaBills, I think you will like it more than PayPal.
That's one hell of a necro post, though.
Kill -9.