As PayPal can take money from users without a PayPal account, this is fine for one off payments. But to create a recurring payment, the user *must* have a PayPal account so they can have the ability to see their payment history and delete subscriptions.

How is this handled in uc_recurring? Is the payment rejected by UC or is the initial payment taken, but no recurring payment set up? Or have I misunderstood PayPal in that everybody ends up creating a PayPal account whether they currently have one or not?

Comments

univate’s picture

univate commented

If you are using Website Payment Standard then your users need a paypal account for you to process recurring payments.

I think with Paypal's website payment pro you can set it up so the user doesn't have an paypal account for you to process recurring payment.

Scott McCabe’s picture

Scott McCabe commented

With Website Payments Pro, if you don't store credit card information in your own database, your subscribers need to have a PayPal account in order for PayPal to have access to a valid credit card to charge the recurring fee.

Here is the documentation page: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=develo...

dunx’s picture

dunx commented

So... for PPS or PPP with no CC details stored, when UC requests a user create a recurring payment via PayPal that the user won't even be given the option to pay by credit card; they'll only get the option to pay via their existing PayPal account or create a new PayPal account. That's presumably different to a one off payment when they get the option of using their PayPal account or a credit card.

I guess I need to play with these things and work them through!

Scott McCabe’s picture

Scott McCabe commented

Within a PayPal account, one can add a credit card to it to use for purchases. If the merchant doesn't store the cc data, then the PayPal account is the only place such cc data is possibly stored, because PayPal apparently does not offer a separate service for storing cc data (a service similar to CIM for authorize.net).

In other words, if you don't store the cc data, and PayPal doesn't offer another way to store cc data (i.e. without creating a PayPal account and then adding a cc to it), and the recurring fee needs to process without the subscriber entering cc data, then UC has no where to find the cc data to process, which of course won't work.

Is there a reputable third party out there who offers cc data storage service for merchants interested in using PayPal as a payment gateway?

Would authorize.net and CIM be a better fit?

univate’s picture

univate commented

I'm not aware of any such service, although the ubercart forums might be a better place to ask this question.

My opinion is that if you want to accept actual credit card payments directly via your site then you may as well go get a real merchant account that doesn't have all the restrictions that paypal has.

univate’s picture

univate commented
Status: Active » Fixed

I believe this question has been answered.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.