Paypal Adaptive Preapproval Payments

Question

I was digging a lot in Paypal documentation about Preapproval Payments and I can't find if it allows to just create a preapproval contract without actually creating a payment. The example shows that I can pass a parameter to show a checkbox for preapproving future payments.

The thing is I'd like to make sure every user on website has his PP account preapproved before they start buying stuff so I'd like to check first if preapproval key exists in database and if not then allow user to preauthorize future payments so only then they can start buying.

So is there an option to preapprove before user actually buy something ? I've seen somewhere that you can pass 0 as amount of order, but I can't really find where did I saw it. Thanks in adavance.

Answer 1

Yes, the Preapproval API can be called on its own entirely separate from any Pay calls. Preapproval by itself does nothing more than generate the preapproval key so you can save it accordingly.

From that point on you can pull that key any time you want to generate a Pay request for that person.