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Paypal Subscriptions from PHP

My UK client wants to have a website where users subscribe through
PayPal and automatically get a notification and a charge every 12
months for what they purchased on the website. What's the PHP way to
do this with the PayPal API?

As well, do you have experience in the trenches with such a solution
and can give me any warnings about this?
Jan 28 '08 #1
2 1267
On Jan 27, 11:27 pm, Manuel Lemos <mle...@acm.orgwrote:
Hello,

on 01/28/2008 12:43 AM Roberto said the following:
My UK client wants to have a website where users subscribe through
PayPal and automatically get a notification and a charge every 12
months for what they purchased on the website. What's the PHP way to
do this with the PayPal API?
After further investigation of this, I was not impressed with PayPal
at all. Here's why. First, you have to rely on PayPal to actually
handle the 12 month renewal, and it's a good idea to test it. Fine, so
you test it in their sandbox, but the sandbox errors out all over the
place and is non-functional. You try again a few days later and again,
more system errors with the sandbox site. Gives you a warm fuzzy
confidence level there, doesn't it? Second, if your confidence of
PayPal is low on complex transactions (beyond the BuyNow kind of
thing), how is it going to get even better to think that they're going
to email and renew the subscription after 12 months? It's not. You
also lose too much of your control.

The best thing to me at least was to let the website handle the
subscription through pseudo-subscriptions using a BuyNow button and a
renewal notice by email that includes a hyperlink back to the page
with another BuyNow button on it. That way, you have more control,
it's incredibly easy to set up, you don't have to go through hoops to
test it, and you don't have to worry about PayPal screwing it up
except on their BuyNow process, rather than the Subscription process.
So far, my luck has been great with the BuyNow process, so at least my
confidence is there for that.

Unless any of you can say otherwise...
Feb 5 '08 #2
Well, my confidence level with Paypal has gone down because of the
terrible system error bugs in the sandbox. Speaking with my client
about it and showing him the evidence, he understood and believes that
instead of eventually switching in a later phase from BuyNow pseudo-
subscriptions and into IPNs, he'd rather just integrate the eCommerce
completely into the site with a merchant provider service that's not
related to PayPal. PayPal's customer service and tech support is
uninformed, uninterested, and scary, by the way.
Feb 5 '08 #3

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