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Using PayPal Subscriptions for Subscriptions-Based
Content
PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring Payments let you accept recurring payments
for your service. When you set up Subscriptions, you can offer subscribers a
trial period, special introductory rates, and a regular rate. Subscribers are
billed automatically according to the terms you specify, removing the hassle of
keeping track of which payments you have and have not received. PayPal
Subscription buttons can also help you improve your buyer experience with
customizable buttons, secure payments, and the ability to prepopulate your
subscribers’ PayPal signup pages. PayPal provides Instant Payment Notifications
to give you instant notification of all subscriptions activities and to
facilitate Subscription Password Management
If you did not upgrade your account to a Premier or Business account, you cannot
receive payment. So, you should upgrade your PayPal account before you do any
experiment with Website Payments Standard features. You can do this easily
through the account itself by logging in and visiting
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_business-upgrade-info
Once you have upgraded your account to a Premier or Business account, you are just few steps away from
collecting money from your subscribers using the features of PayPal Website Payments
Standard. In order to start, please follow the following steps:
- Drag and drop an instance of the Subscription Button control from your Visual Studio Toolbox as shown below:
The first property of this control that you need to set is your Business Email
Address or Merchant ID. Merchant ID is an alternative to using your Email
address. It is better not to expose your business email address in order to
protect your Email Inbox from SPAMs. You can get your Merchant ID from your
PayPal account's Profile section. You can set either Business Email or Merchant ID from the Smart Tag or from the Property
Editor.
Now you may want to set few more properties like Subscription Name, Billing
Cycle, Regular Rate etc
and you can do all of these using the Wizard for the button which can be called
by clicking the link found in the Smart Tag as shown in the following
ScreenShot.
- Furthermore, you may choose to set the visual styles and PayPal page behaviors for
the subscription button. Just click the button "Next" shown in the wizard and you will
be taken to configure the display page as shown in the following screenshot.
Please note: If your account is not upgraded to a Premier or Business account,
then, you will not see any affect of these styling properties for PayPal page.
For example, if you set a header image url, you will not see that image when you
click the Subscription button and taken to PayPal website. You will see your
email address as the header of the page.
- Handling Instant Payment Notification (IPN) from PayPal:
Instant Payment Notification is a mechanism by which you receive transaction data,
and it allows you to integrate PayPal payments with your website’s back-end operations.
While you are configuring your Subscription Button so that your customer can submit it
to PayPal, you can setup options for
handling Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
for the transaction related to the Subscription Button too. It is very easy when you have
this control as you wont have to do any change in your
PayPal profile but handle
IPN_Notified event and attach
an event handler method. This control will send necessary information to PayPal
so that IPN is activated and processed. Only you need to make sure that you have
a PayPal premier or business account rather than just a personal account. Please
Click here
for learning IPN handling in details.
Go to
Step 3 by clicking the Next Button for setting up IPN related properties.
- Programming "Thank You for Payment" Page:
Whenever your customer is transferred back to your website from PayPal website after
completing or cancelling a payment (pursuant to submission of your Subscription
button),
you can execute post payment business logic on your website by
handling Payment Data Transfer (PDT).
This control is capable of firing an event named
PayPal_Returned whenever your customer is returned to your website
from PayPal website. You can program this "Return page" very easily when you have
this control. Please
Click here
for learning PDT handling in details.
Go to Step 4 by clicking the Next Button for setting up PayPal return / PDT related
properties.
Please Note:
PDT
Status will be returned as
FAILED when using a free trial. Because,
PDT
returns information when a payment has been made. Since the trial is free, it
will not return any information. If you are needing information back
through the use of PDT you would need have the trial for atleast 0.01, or use
IPN
to do what you are doing with the returned PDT information as this information will be
returned regardless.
-
If you want to set values programmatically in the run mode, you can use snippets
(C#.Net) like this : Assume that the instance of the control in the page is named by "SpiceLogicPayPalStd1".
- If you already have
provided the LicenseKey
from the design mode Smart Tag, then you are ready to accept subscription from your
subscribers from this page. If you run this page, the customer will be able to click
the button and then he/she will be taken to PayPal website immediately and your
customer will be asked to subscribe for regular rate of 23.56$ by PayPal. If you did not provide the License
Key yet, your customer will be taken to PayPal SandBox.
- You are done. It is very easy to collect money from your customers using this control.
Click Event:
You may want to set the properties of your Subscription Button after the subscriber has clicked the Button.
For example, in your web form, you may have a text box asking your subscriber's name. So, if the button is clicked,
you want to set the SubscriptionName of this Subscription button to the subscriber's Name.
In order to do that, this control has an event named "Click".
It is similar to any button control's Click Event. If you attach event handler
to this event, then the event handler method will be executed before the data is
transferred to PayPal.
Not only PayPal related properties, you can also set Image Button related properties
like Image URL, Border Color, Border Width etc from the property editor.
Still Confused ?
If you are still confused, please check the sample application that comes with
the setup.exe file you have downloaded from our website. Also please do not
hesitate to ask us as many questions as you want from our
Help Desk
.
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