PayPal - can payer be different from the subscriber?

Question

I am using PayPal's Enhanced Recurring Payments (ERP) and the REST APIs to allow users to buy a subscription to our online service.

We often have one payer purchasing subscriptions for others. When that payer gets his recurring payment email, only the payer's name appears and not the user's name.

Is there any way to include both the payer's name and the user's name on the receipt, IPNs and other communications from PayPal?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You'll need to build that into your app. For example, you could have them enter the payer and subscriber details in a form prior to sending them over to PayPal. Save those details in your database and then pass the record ID over to PayPal along with the payment details. You could use the invoice parameter for the custom parameter for this, for example.

That value would then come back in IPN so you could easily query your database to pull all the details back out and process things accordingly.