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Paypal Website Payments Pro recurring paymets via Paypal Express Checkout - How they notify us about next payment?

We have set up Website Payments Pro account and I managed to use ruby gem paypal-recurring to create initial payment and recurring profile.

But I still don't know few things and I can't find answer to some of them in API documentation (and/or on stack overflow).

  • do they notify us via IPN that the next payment is billed?
  • OR should I take granted that they bill the user every billing period automatically without any notification and I should rely on "cancel" IPN request (when the user cancels the payment on his/her paypal account)?
  • OR I should be the one who will request next payment to users paypal account every billing period? (if this is the case, then I don't really get why I'm sending billing period to paypal when I'm creating recurring profile...)
  • OR it works some other way?
Solution

  • do they notify us via IPN that the next payment is billed?

    Exactly. You'll receive an IPN message each time a recurring payments profile is billed.
    The main ID to refer to in each IPN message is the recurring_payment_id, which is the recurring payments profile ID which you got in response for calling the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile API.

    The IPN message will also include other data, such as the outstanding balance, next payment date, et cetera.
    You can find a list of all included variables here