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An interesting aspect of PayPal's "Subscription and Recurring Payments" feature is the ability to offer subscribers a free "trial period" after signup. Here, PayPal automatically tracks for how long a subscriber has been using the service after signup, and sends out notification when the trial period is about to expire and the payment is due. This is an easy way for service providers to offer promotional "try before you buy" schemes without adding greater complexity to their billing systems.
Word to the wise - we've had a lot of problems using Paypal's subscription service, including the following:
- 4 days delay in doing the recurring charges - it seems they only discovered this after we notified them of this issue
- errors in the sandbox environment - again, they only discovered this after we notified them
- the "free trial period" feature doesn't work, either in the sandbox or in the real live system. When we discussed it with them, they suggested that we just set the first charge date into the future. This works.
- one day they changed their system to require Card verification w/o telling us. Our profile set-ups started failing and it was only after we went through various levels of tech support did they realize the problem
- incredibly, on Nov 11 they arbitrarily changed the subscription profile IDs (the ID by which we recognize who a subscription belongs to) in their IPNs, so we would get a recurring charge notification, but it referenced an ID we didn't have in our system. For about 6 weeks now, we have had to manually reconcile these in a laborious process. They then fixed the problem for subscriptions created after Nov 11, only to break it for those that were created before Nov 11. It's incredible.
- We're very disappointed in their engineering, QA, and tech support teams are below-par. Basically, I have had to point out a problem and then spend the time figuring out the parameters (e.g under what conditions it occurs) before they get an inkling there is an issue
- now, we're seeing that about 30% of recurring transactions are failing. Unfortunately, since they sit between us and the gateway, we don't have visibility on the exact error. We're quite certain that 30% of users have not lost their credit, but their tech support is useless in helping us figure out what's going on.
As painful as it will be, we're moving on to another provider. We've spend entirely too much time with Paypal's problems. Our advice: save yourselves a lot of trouble and go with someone else.
- 4 days delay in doing the recurring charges - it seems they only discovered this after we notified them of this issue
- errors in the sandbox environment - again, they only discovered this after we notified them
- the "free trial period" feature doesn't work, either in the sandbox or in the real live system. When we discussed it with them, they suggested that we just set the first charge date into the future. This works.
- one day they changed their system to require Card verification w/o telling us. Our profile set-ups started failing and it was only after we went through various levels of tech support did they realize the problem
- incredibly, on Nov 11 they arbitrarily changed the subscription profile IDs (the ID by which we recognize who a subscription belongs to) in their IPNs, so we would get a recurring charge notification, but it referenced an ID we didn't have in our system. For about 6 weeks now, we have had to manually reconcile these in a laborious process. They then fixed the problem for subscriptions created after Nov 11, only to break it for those that were created before Nov 11. It's incredible.
- We're very disappointed in their engineering, QA, and tech support teams are below-par. Basically, I have had to point out a problem and then spend the time figuring out the parameters (e.g under what conditions it occurs) before they get an inkling there is an issue
- now, we're seeing that about 30% of recurring transactions are failing. Unfortunately, since they sit between us and the gateway, we don't have visibility on the exact error. We're quite certain that 30% of users have not lost their credit, but their tech support is useless in helping us figure out what's going on.
As painful as it will be, we're moving on to another provider. We've spend entirely too much time with Paypal's problems. Our advice: save yourselves a lot of trouble and go with someone else.
Wondering if you have found a satisfactory alternative to Paypal for this purpose.
I am working on paypal subscription,Can anybody help me to implement it properly...I want to know "How to verify the ipn message sent by paypal"..
Another thing-I am using subscription and modification in 2 different forms.Using different notify url's for both..I am confused,where paypal will send the ipn message after automatic payment on the installment of subscription.
Another thing-I am using subscription and modification in 2 different forms.Using different notify url's for both..I am confused,where paypal will send the ipn message after automatic payment on the installment of subscription.
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