Trying to implement automatic payments via the Paypal Reference Transaction API.
Manage to make it work on sandbox but I noticed on the customer summary page, it refers to the payments as "preapproved payments".
Comparing it to services I used where automatic payments are enabled, the customer summary page shows them as "automatic payments".
Now I'm wondering if these are two different things. Or maybe the sandbox site has outdated/updated naming.
Are they the same?
Well, there are lots of different terms for these you might be seeing, but they are different things.
If you see preapproved payments, preapproval, billing agreement, reference transaction, then that's referring to having an agreement on file that allows your application to process payments on behalf of the user. This could be for any amount at any time, so you can build much more flexible apps with this sort of thing. It's also harder to get approved because it gives you, the app owner, a lot of power. Your app would be in charge of triggering payments when necessary.
Subscriptions, recurring payments, recurring billing would be referring to where you create a profile on the PayPal system, and their system takes care of triggering payments for you. These are more limited because it's a fixed amount that gets processed at a fixed interval.