PayPal subscription vs recurring?

Question

Can someone explain the difference between the two? From what I have read, subscription is the one where you grab the HTML button from PayPal, whereas recurring is done via the API.

Is that it or is there more to it?

If so, how do subscription customers cancel their subscription?

^{(And, why does PayPal make it so developers have to trawl forums for answers?!)}

Insufferable

Answer 1

PayPal's different type of recurring transactions:

Subscription

A subscription is created via a Website Payments Standard Subscribe button. Before 2009, the subscription profile ID started with S-XXXXXXXX. You are not able to manage these subscriptions via any API calls. After 2009 the subscription profile ID starts with I-XXXXXX. You are able to cancel these subscriptions via the ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatus API call.

Recurring Payments Profile

A recurring payments profile is created through the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile API, and is accessible for both Express Checkout users, as well as those using Direct Recurring Payments as part of their Website Payments Pro Product.

If you use CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile via Express Checkout, you'll need prior authorization from the buyer, typically obtained by passing BILLINGTYPE=RecurringPayments in your initial SetExpressCheckout API call.

If you're using Direct Recurring Payments, you'll be able to directly pass in the credit card details into the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile API call.

Recurring Billing
Available for Payflow Pro / Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition customers. This works similar to Direct Recurring Payments, except it's done through the Payflow API.

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In all cases, a 'profile' is created, and PayPal is the one doing the actual billing on the schedule that you provided. You don't need to make any further API calls for the subscription / recurring payments profile / recurring billing profile to be processed.

W

Is it possible to continue the recurring payment till user cancels? – Lunitidal

Yes, that's not a problem at all; how you would specify it would depend on the product, though. – W

Now is 2012 and my all subscriptions till today start with S- and I am not able to use cancellation method. Maybe someone found a solution? – Gwenette

That's correct; if your account has created any subscription prior to 2009, it will continue to create S- type subscriptions today. – W

I have created my subscription button one week ago using Profile -> My selling tools -> PayPal Buttons and they all comes with S- prefix. The generated button url is paypal.com/cgi-bin/… Spend one week trying to solve this without successs. – Gwenette

@PayPal_Robert Can we create subscriptions using Express Checkout if we own standard or business PayPal accounts without any additional PayPal add-ons (like something that costs additional $30 per month)? – Biweekly

Btw, suppose we got a Subscription created via Website Payments Standard (subscr_id starts with I-), what IPN will we receive for a recurring payment (like a month after subscription was created) - subscr_payment or recurring_payment? – Biweekly

The answer regarding before/after 2009 is not correct. I have two paypal accounts, one older one newer. The older one still gives me S- numbers and the newer one gives me I- numbers. Maybe a bug in PayPals backend, they are so unprofessional. – Thanet

Does anybody know how this changes for Enhanced Recurring Payments for Website Payments Standard? – Spherulite

I started a new account in Mar-2013. It started creating I- type subscriptions, then soon after this account changed to S- type subscriptions for no reason. I didn't change anything Recently, I've had problems with the S- subscriptions getting cancelled for no reason, it doesn't say that they've been cancelled but the payments have stopped coming in. Their tech support told me that it was because I was using the old S- subscriptions but offered to pay me the missing subscriptions. So S- subscriptions are faulty and they'll secretly stop the payments without telling you! – Padauk

Answer 2

And one more thing that I noticed.

When we make an API call to get the Transaction-details for a recurring/subscription transaction, the subscriptions which have their Profile-ID's starting with 'S-' have their TRANSACTIONTYPE as 'subscr_payment' and the subscriptions with Profile-ID's starting with 'I-' have their TRANSACTIONTYPE as 'recurring_payment'

Don't know if I am completely right.

Grad

We create subscriptions via Website Payments Standard html form and we receive IPN with tnx_type of subscr_payment, but subscr_id starts with I-. Kinda my 5 cents to overall PayPal mess... – Biweekly

This is not true for me. We have TRANSACTIONTYPE ='subscr_payment' while subscr ID = 'I-XXXX' – Condolence