paypal subscription with recurring trial period

Question

With paypal pdt subscription, what I want to achieve is this:

I want users to subscribe on discounted rate for 12 months and later regular rate will start.

Is it possible to charge $10 every month for 12 months and after 12 months $15 every month? (that is trial period of 12 months with 10$/ month and the regular charge of $15/month).

Do we have such facility in paypal PDT subscription module?

What I see in documentation is it provide only 2 trial periods but what I want its recurring trial period.

Defibrillator

Is this something that you can ask Paypal? – Corinnacorinne

You might have more luck with their documentation here: paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/subscr-manual-outside – Mcewen

Maybe this documentation of paypal can help you: developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/… – Oloroso

Answer 1

No, you cannot set up multiple recurring payments in a single flow. However, you can of course set up one recurring payment for the value of all subscriptions combined.
E.g. 10*0.99 for a 9.99 recurring payment for 10 subscription of 0.99. (Note however, that by default recurring payments can only be increased by 20% in price unless you're using Direct Payment Recurring Payments).

I believe the issue is that you could indeed include multiple billing agreements in a SEC flow, but not for multiple recurring payments profiles. In fact, you can specify up to 10 billing agreements in SetExpressCheckout. These would be for use with reference transactions as opposed to recurring payments.

Devlen

This isn't right. You can have one regular recurring payment and one trial recurring payment, which is exactly what the OP needs. – Helmsman

@VictorHenriquez Which section in my answer do you think is wrong? Its not two payment methods but a single regular payment method with periods being defined for trial and regular periods which comes under a single flow. But to set up multiple single flows isnt possible. – Devlen

I quote you "No, you cannot set up multiple recurring payments in a single flow". This is confusing at best. A profile can have one optional trial period and a single regular payment period in a single flow which can be interpreted as multiple recurring payment periods in a single flow. Anyway the OP is not asking about setting multiple flows, I believe he just want to know how to solve his problem: setting a trial and a regular payment period using the PayPal API. – Helmsman

Answer 2

Yes, you can achieve your goal with the PayPal API. From their documentation:

A profile can have at most one optional trial period and a single regular payment period.

[...]

Each recurring payments profile has a regular payment period that defines the amount and frequency of the payment.

[...]

You can optionally include a trial period in the profile by specifying the following fields in the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile request.

Here's the specific documentation related to this feature: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECRecurringPayments/

Helmsman

Answer 3

I believe you can change that parameter to a number of cycles of free trial. So change 2 to 12. I am not totally certain as I have been exploring the api recently.

Celebrity