CODEWITHSUNDEEP
paypalpayment-gatewaystripe-payments
Marcos
Marcos

Reputation: 21

How to Auto-recharge an account using Paypal or Stripe

Has anyone found a way to auto recharge a mobile user's account using Paypal, Stripe or a similar payment platform? Similar to Skype's auto-refill, we would like to automatically deduct payment from our user's credit card when their credit is running low. Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1418

Answers (2)

geewiz
geewiz

Reputation: 2206

Tal is correct that if you want to bill a customer for aggregated usage, you (not the payments provider) generally need to track that usage and decide when to request additional funds.

But in order to make a "top-up" payment for a user's account happen without requiring action from the user to separately authorize each top-up you also need a payment token of some sort from your payments provider that grants you the authority to bill the user. With some payments provider this token is the raw card number; with more sophisticated solutions you get a derived token so that you don't have to store the card number (with all the associated risks & responsibilities).

PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, and other providers all have products that will do this for you.

Upvotes: 1

Tal
Tal

Reputation: 7997

Stripe and PayPal are only payment providers, and do not cover any business logic the payment is used for. If you opt to use those services, you'll need to maintain the user's balance on your end and issue a CHARGE request when it runs low.
There are many payment services out there such as BrainTree or BlueSnap that support scheduled payments (e.c. Monthly, Quarterly), and some more sophisticated plans, but still none will maintain a usage balance for your customer. That's simply because only you can tell when a credit was consumed.

Upvotes: 1

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