Paypal pre approved transactions

Question

we are developing a system for which we would like to "pre charge" (using paypal) the user for what he will consume. We would like the user to authorize a pre approved payment, setting a max amount per month that we could charge, and then in our system he would specify "when my credit goes lower than XX, charge me YY", for example he starts consuming our service and when his credit in our system goes lower than $100, he would like to automatically add $300 of credit through his paypal account. I think skype uses this method with paypal.

Its important to know that its not a fixed price subscription, because he can update the value of each charge on our system and also its not based on a regular period, if he consumes almost all his credit every 2 days, the system would charge him automatically every 2 days, then he stops using the system for 2 weeks so no charge would be done.

Another website that uses something like this is godaddy, the amount of each domain renewal changes, and they charge me without asking me for permission or to login into paypal.

Here you can see an example of how it looks my "go daddy" pre approved payment. I allow them to charge me up to $100 per month, so if they can make 3 charges of $25 this month, and on the next month they can make 4 charges of $25 (because the credit available has "renewed").

How can we achieve this? We tried this: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/ht_ap-basicPreapproval-curl-etc/

But the problem is that it doesnt even appear on the same "pre approved" section where the godaddy pre approved payment appears. Also, it doesnt "renew"... we tried with "maxTotalAmountOfAllPayments=100" and "paymentPeriod=DAILY", so in the sandbox enviroment we could test if it renewed those "$100" each day, but one day we did 3 charges of $30 and on the next day (and also 2 days later) we tried to charge $30 more and we got "The total amount of all payments exceeds the maximum total amount for all payments". It looks like this is not the method that we need...

If anyone knows which is the method that we should use to achive this, we would be really greateful if you could tell us.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you're confusing Preapproved Payments with Billing Agreements, which are similar, but functionally a little different.

What GoDaddy is using there is a billing agreement. You set those up with Express Checkout.