Paypal Recurring Payment Profile- Immediate Access

Question

I have set up a recurring payments profile using the Express Checkout API following these steps.

In my sandbox merchant & user accounts I see that the payments profile has been created, but no money has been sent and the profile is still in the "pending" state. See screenshot.

It is a subscription to a website, and I want to give the user immediate access. I could grant access to my website immediately when a profile is set up, but then a user could cancel the profile before the payment goes through and gain free temporary access to my site.

Alternatively, I could wait until the profile updates to "active" to grant access, but this may take many hours and I want to give the customer access as soon as possible.

How is a digital subscription like this usually handled? Should I be using a different Paypal service? Can I somehow speed up the initial transaction so that the initial payment is processed immediately instead of waiting a few hours? Or is it common practise to "not worry" about the potential of malicious users stealing a few free hours access?

Answer 1

The best way is to treat the first payment as normal payment and start the subscription from the next period.

So for example for monthly subscription for 10$ user buys normal product for 10$ and you also create a subscription profile that is starting from the next month.