Paypal REST API Subscriptions

Hi @timnethersgmailcom, Thank you so much for your nice words and the donation , that really means a lot to us.

Well to process subscription using Credit Card Rest you need DCC ( Direct Credit Cards) option enabled against your PayPal account . Please write at your PayPal merchant support to get that enabled and process CreditCard Payments.

Let me know if you still have any other questions or concerns.
Thanks

Oliver

Apparently Paypal says you have to have Paypal Payments Pro for DCC to be enabled. Your description within the plugin of, “PayPal direct credit card payments using the REST API. This allows you to accept credit cards directly on the site without the need for the full Payments Pro,” is a bit misleading, I thought it was a solution that would keep the user onsite.

PayPal Payments Pro and REST DCC are two separate products / APIs. They are similar in that they would accomplish the same thing, but again, they are two entirely separate gateways in the plugin.

REST DCC does indeed allow you to accept credit cards directly on the site exactly the same way Pro would, however, PayPal is no longer accepting new applications for REST DCC. Instead, they’re redirecting people to Pro or Braintree.

They all provide the same solution (direct credit card processing on the site) but they use different APIs and have different pricing models. Our plugin supports all of them.

Anyway, yeah, if you want direct credit card processing on your site then as of now you’ll need to use PayPal Pro or Braintree.

Thank you for your thorough replies!

The default Braintree plugin options that appears on the Payments tab of WooCommerce, confusingly shows as not accepting Subscriptions. Why is this confusing? The WooCommerce site says Braintree’s integration supports Woocommerce Subscriptions.

Regardless, your Braintree Credit Card Option does list Braintree as accepting Subscriptions. Can you explain your benefits of your Braintree Credit Card option over the ‘WooCommerce PayPal Powered by Braintree Gateway’ plugin offering separate Braintree Paypal and Credit Card Options?

Either way, I was able to run a subscription through with your Braintree option. It looks to be pending until tomorrow.

Lastly, is there any benefit to requesting Paypal Reference transactions? Does that improve the Braintree Subscription model?

The benefits of our plugin are primarily that a single plugin will handle all the different PayPal gateways you may want (ie. Express Checkout, Payments Pro, Braintree, etc.) Also, within each of those, we have more features and functionality than you’ll find elsewhere.

Make sure to keep an eye on that subscription renewal and make sure it processes correctly. For some reason I do feel like I’ve seen reports where they’ll fail depending on certain variables involved, so if yours does fail please submit a ticket here so we can look into that more directly with you. Hopefully that won’t be necessary.

Reference transactions are available by default with the direct credit card options, but you do need to get approval for it to use with Express Checkout. It allows you to include options like “save my payment method” during checkout for quicker checkout in the future, and the ability to process future orders if your customer were to say “just use my saved info from before”, for example. With reference transactions you can do that sort of stuff without actually storing sensitive data on your servers.

Alright, thanks for the clarification. Based on what you said, I shouldn’t need to use reference transactions with your Braintree Credit Card for subscription purposes?

Yeah, for braintree subscriptions should work fine without any trouble.

Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Maybe you should make a note that Braintree requires you to follow the Braintree Plugins signup model or they suspend your account after its activated when you try to process a Paypal transaction.

Braintree is extremely frustrating, and now my account is in limbo. They locked out my account and sent my support request to the Braintree Paypal department, who says I ‘have to use the WooCommerce Braintree plugin to signup,’ but my Paypal uses the same email account as what I used for the manual signup for Braintree and is now in a loop, where I can’t get signed in via the WooCommerce Braintree app.

And the second option allowed for is a manual sign in to your Braintree account, but I can’t do that because they suspended my account.

@timnethersgmailcom, We have not had any reports of this from any other users, so I’m not sure why you’re running into this. Do you have a ticket open with them where they are helping you with this? I may be able to get my direct rep involved if you’re still having troubles.

Thanks for looking into this. My ticket is 2005130.

From what I’m told, if you go to braintreepayments.com and signup for an account the registration makes a Braintree Direct account. While the application is still under review you can process a transaction, and I did, and when you process a transaction from WooCommerce using your plugin payment integration someone at Braintree has decided that yields a Braintree Direct account suspension.

When I inquired as to why my account was suspended, I was told via email that I had to register with ‘PayPal powered by Braintree gateway’, which is the registration via the (official Paypal) ‘Braintree (Credit Card)’ plugin component.

Since the people at the support end of the email have never used the product, they don’t initially connect the dots that a suspended account can’t re-register, using their official plugin, with the same paypal email address as used by the recently-registered-and-suspended account; the account without further details is put in a temporary suspended for closing state – which was never even told to me in an email – I had to find out by not being able to login and attempting a password reset (even though my password was correct); when I finally connected the dots via a phone call, I asked if after my account was closed if I could re-use my email to which multiple individuals (one from accounts and another from technical services) said they did not know. They suggested I should try to get my account re-opened and try again. The accounts services individual said he would reach out to the banking partner to see if my account was available for re-opening or if it was entirely closed.

The person before him (Stephanie) said I needed to re-register with a different email address, and I could connect my paypal address.

This whole thing seems really inefficient, and I thought you deserved to be in the loop. The odd thing is Braintree Direct’s site reads as if it supports paypal transactions entirely, and even the pending batch transaction seemed to show that.

Personal Note:
What’s worse is that if you intend to use subscriptions, the ‘official’ plugin has an X on the WooCommerce Settings > Payments > Recurring Payments column indicating the official plugin doesn’t support recurring payments. This indication would lead one to presume the official Braintree Payment integration doesn’t officially support subscriptions; meanwhile, your Braintree integration lists that your integration does support ‘recurring payments’ – thus, anyone who wants to use subscriptions would default to your integration. Strangely though, while the ‘Payments’ screen shows that it doesn’t support ‘recurring payments’, the site blatently says it supports the official ‘Woocommerce Subscriptions’ ($199/yr) which I actually tried and found was nothing better than the free version I swapped to.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Nethers Web Design.

That ticket number doesn’t match our system. Where did you create that ticket? Seems like maybe that ticket number you gave me is from Braintree’s ticket system..??

Our plugin is intended to be used with Woo Subscriptions if you are indeed trying to use it with subscriptions, so I’m a little confused there, too. You say you’re using a different plugin for that? Which one?

Technically, anything that supports Woo token payments should work fine with our Braintree integration since it supports token payments as well, and that’s how the Woo Subscriptions plugin works with it. So it sounds like you’re using some different tools than most, which we’d like to get figured out so we can update our documentation. If Woo Subscriptions isn’t actually required, then that’s a good thing for us to let people know about. ??

As for the account creation / suspension issue, that is completely odd. I have not had any other person report that sort of a problem, and we have many people using our plugin with Braintree. I’m going to pass this information to my contacts at PayPal to see if they can shed some light on what’s going on here. I’ll report back as soon as I get more info.

I am having the exact same problem trying to do the seemingly simple task of finding a Paypal method of accepting subscription payments.

I too am using Webtoffee Subscriptions and am struggling to workout which PayPal payment method I should be using.

Are there any PayPal methods that are free and allow subscription methods to be used?

@angelleye and @szkoda I previously used YithSubscriptions and WooCommerce Subscriptions. WooCommerce Subscriptions works fine but is overpriced at $200/year. Yith works okay too, but requires the your customers to create an account with Paypal and control their subscription from Paypal.

Due to those downsides, I’m giving “Subscriptions for WooCommerce”, aka WebToffee Subscriptions, a shot. It offers a free and premium plugin. The free one is good enough for what I wanted, which was on-site user control of the subscriptions.

Since Braintree suspended and closed my manually created Braintree Direct account that I created to use with your plugin for recurring payments, I went ahead and re-registered via the Official Braintree Plugin with a different email and setup that payment integration; I ran the exact charge/payment/subscription through that my Braintree Direct account account got suspended and closed for.

Assuming that charge processes fine, I’ll just stick to the official plugin method.

It roughly does the same thing, except it says that it doesn’t support ‘recurring payments’. I’ll post an update here if they process the payment in the next day or two (says 2-5 business days), and again if the monthly subscription does process on month two (or what I refer to as recurring payments, which it says it doesn’t do).

To answer your question @angeleye, I posted that ticket via the Braintree Direct support contact website. I was transferred around a few times between Accounts and Technical Services. Then told to go over to Paypal Braintree, which told me they couldn’t help me because it was Braintree Direct. An utter mess, hopefully I don’t have to use their support again.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Nethers Web Design.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Nethers Web Design.

I’m not familiar with Webtoffee. Does it use Woo Token Payments to process future payments, or is it meant to create actual subscription profiles with the payment gateway so that it triggers future payments?

Our plugin is designed to work with Woo token payments, which is what Woo Subscriptions uses. This utilizes reference transactions (token payments) to process those future payments, and it gives you the flexibility to charge whatever amount you need, whenever you need.

Actual subscription profiles are limited to whatever interval and amount you originally set. These would create a subscription in the PayPal system and PayPal would handle triggering future payments, which would then require the use of IPN to get that data back into WooCommerce.

So there are a lot of variables involved here, which is why it seems like such a simple thing is being complicated.