PayPal subscription with on-demand variable payments

Question

I am studying how to implement a scenario with PayPal APIs where the customer confirms a PayPal subscription once and authorise all future payments. The amount is charged only when the user demands the service (ie like a food delivery app: the user agrees to the subscription once, and from that moment on he's never asked for confirmation each time he orders and confirms, the amount is automatically charged).

I know it could sound trivial (there are a lot of applications doing this) but actually I can't find that scenario in PayPal documentation.

Looks like the Subscription scenario only allows a cycle, which is not my case. In my scenario there is no cycle: the customer is charged only when consuming products or services (with variable amount from time to time).

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This requires reference transactions, which is an account feature that must be approved an enabled by PayPal. Contact your PayPal account manager or business support ( https://www.paypal.com/smarthelp/contact-us ) to explain the business need and request the feature. (Technical support will not enable the feature.)

As for the implementation, the only publicly documented API is Classic NVP. PayPal may give you guidance on integrating with some newer API, such as "v2" vault (not v1 vault)