PayPal recurring payment profile initial payment delayed

Question

We are creating billing agreements for customers to access our online service. We are using the REST api to create the agreement like this: Initial payment of $10, 1 month trial period ($0), Monthly $10 fee starting after trial

We expect that the "initial payment" should be charged immediately so we can give the customer access to the service. Sometimes (during business hours it seems), the profile is created and the initial payment is charged immediately. However, we see many customers (usually in the middle of the night) placed in a PENDING state. The profile is created, but the initial payment is not charged until many hours later. Origin does not seem to matter - they are a mix of US and international.

Recurring Payments: Profile Details via - Express Checkout

Pending

Customer xxxxx xxxxxxxxx Verified | [email protected]

Profile start date Mar 2, 2015 | Profile ID I-xxxxxxxxxxx

This example was created this morning. We have not received the initial payment yet, and don't expect to until this afternoon. What is Pending and why is the initial payment delayed many hours? Is it possible to setup a billing agreement so that the "initial payment" is charged immediately?

Answer 1

I am having this exact same issue. By tracking our website orders vs the IPN, I've concluded the following: orders made between 10:00 UTC and approx 15:00 UTC do not get processed immediately (regardless of whether they ultimately complete or fail), but seem to end up in a batch/queue. We finally get the IPNs for all the orders placed between these times anywhere from 14:30 UTC to 15:30 UTC.

Any orders placed after 15:00 resume to send the IPN back relatively quickly.

For anyone processing digital goods (as we do) this is unacceptable. This means orders can be delayed up to 5 hours!

I have a ticket open with PayPal to resolve, and I encourage anyone experiencing this to do the same.

Answer 2

We had the same issue when we launched v1.0 of our software and our Developer managed to fix this. At first, it created only the recurring payment profile, but did not send the payment until later. We finally got the payment through with all the other recurring payments about the same time each night (8pm AEST).

We have now rebuilt our software and are having the same issue again in V2.0. I know that it's fixable because we had fixed it and it was working correctly for over 2 years with V1.0, receiving both the payment and the recurring profile notification at the same time, immediately after payment.

Our current Developer cannot work out how to fix it. I believe that it had something to do with auto-returning the customer to the website, after they paid and turning on something in the Paypal account but I can't seem to find it now. Sorry I can't be of more help. Looking forward to a response!