Which Paypal API is for postpaid subscription

Question

Planningto use paypal in our application and here is our scenario we have subscription based application but we charge the customer at the end of the month based on usage they used so we are calculating the amount at the end of the month to particular customer and then we need to charge them from their credit card what they have saved.

So there are two things we need.

1. We need to verify their credit card when they saved in our system.
2. We need to charge them every month end based on their usage so amount is not fixed. So we are planing to run some service that run and calculate amount our end and then one by one each customer charged.

So which method is best to achieve this with paypal?

Answer 1

What you need is essentially a "reference transaction" but there are many terms that get thrown around for that now.

Are you wanting to do this with PayPal Checkout, or are you wanting to do this with PayPal Pro / Braintree credit card processing? Or both?

If you're using PayPal Pro or Braintree, you can run an Authorization (card verification) and then save this authorization ID in your system for that user. When you're ready to process the payment, you would then trigger the API by passing in the reference ID along with the amount you need to charge.

Depending on exactly which product you're working with (PayPal Checkout, PayPal Pro, Braintree, etc.) they will call it different things, but technically it's all the same.

Billing Agreement, Reference Transaction, Token Payment, Vaulted Payment...these are all terms for the same thing, but again, depending on exactly which product you're working with you may see it differently.

For PayPal Checkout REST APIs you'll use Billing Agreements. This will give you a "Billing Agreement ID" that you'll save, and then you can use that to process payments in the future. You will need special approval for this.

If you do this with PayPal Pro or Braintree, though, there is no special approval required. It just comes as a feature included with direct credit card processing.

That's a pretty broad answer to a bit of a broad question. Hopefully it helps.