variable monthly charges to users

Question

I have a situation where I am to bill the site users monthly. But the invoice amount that is raised depends on the the leads that our site generates for his business. For example if the user gets 5 leads from my site and I charge him $10 per lead, at the end of month he will be charged $50. similarly leads might vary each month so will the amount.

Now I cant store his cc/ paypal credentials on my site for security reasons nor can I pre bill him or ask him to take credits and then use it. Please let me know the way to handle this situation. How can I handle this using paypal?

Answer 1

There are a few different ways to handle this, but I would recommend Preapproved Payments, which are part of the Adaptive Payments API.

With this method your users would create a profile with you (using the Preapproval API) when they first create their account on your site. That will give you a preapproval key that you can store with your user account. Then in the future when you need to bill them you can use the Pay API with the preapproval key to process funds immediately without further approval.

If you're working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make these calls very simple for you. You would just use the Preapproval.php template to setup the profiles for people, and then use PayWithOptions.php to process payments using the preapproval key(s) accordingly.

If you end up using it and need more help you can contact me directly for support.