I want my users to be able to subscribe to a recurring payment (using the express checkout api) The first payment needs to be billed immediately that the user subscribes, and I need to know that they have been successfully billed before granting them access.
Is there a straight forward way to do this?
I've tried, creating a recurring payment profile with an INITAMT set, however, it's not clear that the user is being billed (when using the sandbox), and there is no txn_id (or the equivalent) being returned to suggest that billing has been done. I do get an IPN confirmation however that comes "some time" after creating the profile, which makes it difficult to offer a great user experience.
I've tried adding a one time payment, authenticating that with DoExpressCheckoutPayment, then setting up the recurring profile if the one-off payment works, however the Authentication also fails and at this points I've given up (although there may still be some legs in this approach).
Anyway, I thought I'd ask the experts here. Is there a simple way to setup a recurring payment, one payment per month, first payment billed now() and have the first payment confirmed via the API without having to wait an unknown amount of time for an IPN confirmation message?
The only solution I've found (which is poor) is to accept up to a 24 hour delay in being notified that the first month's subscription has been billed. We're now investigating Google checkout and braintree payments as alternatives to paypal so we can migrate away from it.