Recurring Membership Payment

Hi, i am in the process of setting up recurring payments to process annual membership fees on my site.

We have decided to use PayPals PreApproved payments to handle this. The membership is due every 365 days so PayPal will allow us to extend the PreApproval PayPal for 5 years, which means it will process 5 years of membership (we'll review this again in 4 years

Ok, so the problem we are having is that we can't decided how to handle the first initial membership payment when a user joins while also setting up their PreApproval for the following year(s) membership.

We do not have any recurring payments set up at the moment and our site just has a normal PayPal payment set up to pay for their membership (and then contact them again next year)... so now we need to start using recurring to eliminate the need to have to chase payments for next year.

Question: as mentioned above a user just pays for their first year membership as a normal straight forward PayPal payment... so when integrating the new recurring payments using PreApprovals should we just forget about making the normal straight forward payment for the first year and instead just process the first payment as a preapproved payment along with setting up OR should we keep the normal striaght forward instant payment and just add in the recurring PreApproval on top of this?

Thanks in advance for your help...

 

Keep the instant payment, and add the PreApproval on top, that's what I would do it be honest.

 

I think I have read somewhere, that you can use paypal to send automatic invoice, so you could send once a year and get paid, hope that helps!!

 

Have you looked into using the PayPal IPN? You can fully automate your service allowing the user to set up the recurring payments from your website and the IPN Listener will detect whether or not the user has cancelled the recurring payment allowing you to process the account how you wish e.g. send the user an email and alert the administrator so they can either A try and get the client back on the recurring payment or B cancel the account completely.

 

You need to create a PayPal subscription button. Then provide the subscription link to your customer. Once customer will subscribed through that link customer will start auto charge on specified date.