Paypal, Recurring Billing, and ActiveMerchant

Question

I'm trying to research how to add a subscription based pay model on an existing site of mine, but am running into a lot of conflicting information and caused me to be a bit lost.

All I need is a very simple way to set up recurring billing (per month) by credit card. I just need a simple solution, but am having a hard time finding the best practices of setting it up.

So far I understand that this is supported by Paypal's Website Payment Standards option. I just have a few questions regarding how I should implement it:

• First, does Paypal require a user to register for recurring billing with Website Payment Standard?

• I planned to use ActiveMerchant but I found some blogs that says ActiveMerchant doesn't support recurring billing from Paypal. is this true?

• I found the SASS Rails Kit by railskits.com, which says it supports recurring billing with Paypal's Website Payments Standard. If I purchased this, would the code be clear enough to understand and implement in my own site, or is it kind of packaged deal for starter sites and not existing sites?

• I found a lot of blog with help with recurring billing with ActiveMerchant, but using Paypal's Express Checkout. I read about Express Checkout on the Paypal site, but I still can't quite understand what it is, and how it's different from Website Payment Standard. Can anyone explain this in a simple way?

If anyone could answer even just one of these questions, I'd be very grateful!

**By the way, before it gets suggested, I have watched all of Ryan Bates' Paypal screencasts about Paypal, which are great for basics or buying items in a shopping cart, but I don't understand how it should work with recurring billing. Also, it seemed like he skipped some important steps in the video (e.g. the Paypal docs says after your app receives an IPN, you need to send back a confirmation of reception to Paypal, but Ryan does not do this in his screencast). I'm just trying to make sense of all this!

Answer 1

One other potential option is to hit one of the other recurring billing capable gateways like Authorize.net or BrainTree. I don't normally suggest Authorize.net because of their slightly gimpy development process (you have to request a test account if you want to do continual testing which takes about 2 days) but I've done integrations with them on several sites and it works reasonably well. Though they do have the same inane policy as PayPal of naming 19 products which all seem to do what you need but don't in reality.

The only bonus to this is that people don't have to be PayPal members in order to do the payment and I believe Authorize.net has lower fees but that may have just been our accounts; our sales guy was a killer negotiator.

active_merchant and the SaaS Railskit both support Authorize.net and BrainTree.

I wouldn't recommend buying the Railskit just to look at quality code that uses active_merchant though, I'm certain there are other places that you can look for free. Railskits are really designed to be used as a base and it's almost guaranteed to have a different set of assumptions about setup than you had planned on so if you've made it anywhere on your project merging the two would almost certainly be a pain. On the other hand, if you're still just starting the site the Railskit might well be a great way to start over with a really sane environment.

Answer 2

I use the SaaS Railskit, and Highly recommend it. The code is clean, commented and legible. It can be dropped in to an existing app, with minimal tweaking, or used as the foundation for a new app. I suppose it work fine if you just wanted to use it as a reference, or stand-alone payment processing app.

Hope that helps!