PayPal Recurring payments/subscription

Question

I need to create a subscriptions system in my app, where users can subscribe to a certain package and they must be billed monthly.

Moreover, I need to charge their credit card automatically, and without requiring them to have a PayPal account.

I read about https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/erp_overview, but is seems it's not available anymore as I click on sign up and it gives me an error ("Sorry, this feature is not available at this time.").

Then I've read about PayPal Standard Payments, which have a subscription method (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/subscribe_buttons/)

From what I can read there is that this is what is suitable for my use case, and it says that I need to enable the above mentioned service, which it doesn't work.

Can someone point me in the right direction on what service should I use from PayPal in order to implement recurring payments (basically my users will subscribe themselves to a service on my website, and I need to charge them monthly).

Thank you.

Answer 1

If you're wanting to handle credit cards directly I would highly recommend going with Payments Pro w/ Recurring Payments APIs.

You'll have to pay a monthly fee to get it all activated, and it's a little bit more expensive than what you were looking at, but it will give you much greater flexibility building your application(s) into various experiences for your buyers.