Migration from PayPal Payments Pro (w/h recurring billing) + IPN to PayPal Payments via Braintree + Braintree Webhooks

Question

I am working on a migration project for an application, that handles billing using the PayPal Payments Pro API (with recurring billing). For notifications, PayPal IPN is currently being used.

The service currently offers payments via PayPal accounts and Credit Card Payments, but we would like to integrate other payment methods such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, Venmo and possibly Bitcoin in the future.

Right now, most of the service's customers are paying via PayPal recurring payments, and I am looking for a method to migrate from a PayPal only payment solution to Braintree, WITHOUT REQUESTING THE RECURRING PAYMENT USERS TO DO ANYTHING. The migration must be smooth, and the users must still receive email notifications (thus the need to migrate the notification mechanism from IPN to Braintree webhooks).

Has anyone had any experience migrating a PayPal only solution to a Braintree only solution? Retrofitting the current software component into our new Braintree Backend Server could be one option, but I'm looking for a more elegant solution.

P.S. I wasn't able to find anything online about this.

Answer 1

This is a late reply, but we were trying to do exactly this for a client. Unfortunately, the answer is that it's not currently possible, according to the Braintree migration team. While Braintree has the ability to import PayPal billing agreements (identified by IDs starting with B-) into their Vault, which can then be tied with a Braintree recurring payment plan, they do not have the ability to import recurring payments (identified by IDs starting with I-).

While I don't know it for sure, my suspicion is that this is because Braintree has integrated with PayPal using the REST API internally, and PayPal does not currently support the old "recurring payments" feature through REST. I also don't expect them to add that, either, since it seems to have been generally replaced by their new (but incompatible) "billing plans" feature.

(Note that this discussion is complicated by the fact that PayPal, and thus also Braintree, will use the term "billing agreements" at times to refer to all of these features.)