Change your subscription using PayPal vs Amazon FPS

Question

I’m setting up web applications, which largely depend on the ability of users to change subscriptions frequently and significantly. Perhaps I also use the market functions, and I need a system that supports as smoothly.

I have seen many terrible stories about the complexity of modifying a subscription, including double billing or disconnecting users at the wrong time.

I sincerely hope, for example, that this article is http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/2007/09/02/how-to-cure-the-paypal-subscription-blues

outdated. The use cases that I mean are even more complex than the ones he mentioned. For a sample of what I would like to do:

• Support for multiple signatures and types / levels of subscription. For a copy of one user, you can have 1 plan A billed monthly in the amount of 10 and 10 US dollars billed in the amount of 50 US dollars per month and 1 plan D billed at the level of 100 US dollars per year.
• Support for changing the amount of arbitrary payments. For example, a user had a $ 40 per month plan, but then change that to a $ 100 per month plan. Then it is canceled, then subscribes again to $ 50 per month before the period of $ 100 expires. The user must still receive $ 100 for the service for the month for which he paid $ 100, and then must switch to a plan worth $ 40 per month.
• Allow payments of the subscription amount between my users. Thus, one user can initiate a payment of 50% of the amount that he has paid in the system so far. My application will handle these types of transactions in the market, and these payments should work in the context of a subscription ...

It doesn't seem like there is an open source PHP library that does what I need with either Amazon or Paypal. Therefore, I look forward to coding it. (be glad if you are mistaken, perhaps Freemium for PHP?). I cannot use the various subscription services available . Since they, as a rule, do not support the above functions, and also because I need direct access to the PayPal or Amazon FPS APIs for later skills through market problems.

This brings me to my question. Which payment platform should I choose for the convenience of managing subscriptions? Please send me in the right direction, I only have so much time. But I also do not have time to make the wrong decision. Please provide evidence of your preferences and, if possible, detail your work by comparing the two systems. Google has the only other payment platform, and their subscription system is currently in beta testing. If you offer some other better system, please indicate a lot of reasons, because I need a popular payment mechanism with which people will feel comfortable!

-Ft

Answer 1

I see that you asked this question back in December ... if you have not found the answer, I have some suggestions based on my experience with a business problem that is almost identical to yours.

Which PayPal API are you going to use? When using the PayFlow API, I found it was a thousand times easier to just minimize my own subscription service. If your API supports the creation of “reference transactions” based on the previous successful transaction identifier, you can save yourself a headache by tracking the number of user subscriptions, tracking paid and creating a billing script that runs on a daily cronjob, checking each user to see if pay them (and how much), and then create a link sale for each of them.

Of course, don't forget that you must explicitly request user permission before you start billing them on a regular basis, and there should be a good repeating billing and privacy policy. One of the problems with this setting is that you pretty much need to create your own scripts to manage people’s subscriptions and payments - fortunately, I linked the recurring PayPal payment to a web application that already had subscriptions and an account.

Let me know if you need any suggestions on how to do this!