Does Paypal Payments Pro work directly with magento community to accept credit cards for recurring billing?

Question

I have an online subscription store in magento and I was looking at using Paypal payments pro to accept credit cards/debit cards (UK based) to accept payments on recurring basis.

Can I can directly enable Paypal payment pro in magento to accept credit cards for recurring payments or does it require an external plugins (such as aheadworks etc.) for it? There seems to be very little information about recurring payments online and the support staff at most of these companies speak extremely cryptic language.

I tried the integration steps that I found in a Paypal guide online that enables Payment Pro in magento. But when I do that I only get an option to pay through a paypal account. What am I missing here? Do I need an external plugin to accept credit cards?

Answer 1

First, disclaimer, I am working on an US PayPal integration, not a UK PayPal integration, so there may be differences based on that.

Your question is a scenario that I am presently working on. That is, having BOTH direct credit card payment AND PayPal Express Checkout for purchase of subscription-based products (e.g., creating recurring payment profiles) with PayPal being the provider for the direct payment method (via either Payments Pro or Payflow).

There are limitations with Magento as far as recurring profiles are concerned. PayPal Payments Pro does integrate with Magento, however it is not a supported method for setting up recurring profiles in PayPal. You need to utilize Express Checkout.

There is a third-party extension -- "Subscriptions and Recurring Payments" -- available from AheadWorks that provides expanded functionality for recurring payments. The older version (1.9) does support the use of PayPal Payments Pro or Payflow Pro, but NOT Express Checkout. The newer version (2.0) supports the use of ONLY Express Checkout. So you get one or the other. Technically, it is feasible to run BOTH versions of SARP, but it is a hackneyed, server-intensive approach and not one that I would recommend.

If you want to do both Express Checkout -AND- direct credit card pay (via a PayPal product), you have to dive into the deep end of the pool and extend the existing PayPal module in Magento. (I know this, as I am currently in that deep end of the pool!)

Sorry this does not "solve" your problem. I've spent several months doing discovery work on this specific situation and the result was that I either: a) Hack Magento's PayPal module to do what I want. b) Create a custom module that extends Magento's PayPal module. c) Create a standalone transaction API with a separate Magento module to interface to the API.

Answer 2

Payments Pro is for direct credit card processing, so if you have it enabled you would get that option.

I'm pretty sure in Magento when you enable Pro it requires Express Checkout to be enabled as well, so you'll see the Checkout with PayPal button and that would have them just sign in. If somebody clicks the regular checkout button, though, and goes through the remaining steps it'll allow them to enter credit card details directly.

Answer 3

Payments Pro (recurring payments) do not integrate directly with Magento. You can however create recurring profiles by creating billing agreements with PayPal

A billing agreement is a purchase/sales agreement between the store and the customer that is signed/authorized on the side of a payment service. With the Billing Agreements functionality introduced in Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9 and Magento Community Edition 1.4.1, individual customers purchasing products from a web store on regular basis can place sales orders without entering payment information again and again; they can simply grant the authorization to the payment system once.

In other words, a billing agreement is a payment method that allows customers to place orders without providing payment details to the store. After the customer signs a billing agreement with the store on the side of the payment service, the latter provides the store and the customer with the reference ID for the signed billing agreement. The reference ID is a unique number assigned to a billing agreement by the payment system. During further purchases, the customer selects the billing agreement as the payment method and uses the billing agreement reference ID. No other payment information is required for placing an order. The payment system verifies billing agreement information and whether the payment can be fulfilled by the reference ID specified by the customer. After the payment system performs the payment transaction, the reference ID is returned to the Magento system and an order is placed. After a billing agreement is signed with PayPal, the store owner can charge the customer’s PayPal account directly.

Currently Magento supports using only the PayPal payment system for the Billing Agreement functionality. Prior to using the Billing Agreements functionality, the store administrator must contact the PayPal Merchant Technical Services to enabling the billing agreements (reference transactions) for their PayPal merchant account.

More information listed here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/setting-up-billing-agreements-through-paypal//