Is a billing address required by PayPal's Website Payments Pro?

Question

I'm creating a website with rails that sells a virtual service, and therefore don't really want to validate the billing address for credit card transactions.

From what I have read on paypal (page 14 of this pdf) and other resources i have looked at, this should be totally possible. However, when I submit a purchase or an authorize request to paypal with ActiveMerchant I get back the error "Please enter a complete billing address."

Just in case I was doing something incorrectly I copied the code from Railscast 144 (using my own login, password, etc) Even with this code I continue to get the error.

Is there something I'm overlooking? Some setting I have to change on Paypal's side? Or is a billing address now required?

Thanks for your help

Alex

Answer 1

Yes, the billing address is now required even though they do not mention it in their docs. IIRC they changed this right after I did that episode. If you check out the next episode you can see billing address is required.

That said, there may be a setting to turn this requirement off, I have not looked.

Answer 2

A billing address is required, and it seems kind of nonsensical that you say you don't care about the billing address because you're selling a virtual service. Is your business model based on not caring whether someone's using a credit card fraudulently? I don't think that's really going to work out for you, if so.

Answer 3

yes it is, but the api doesn't tell you that. weird, i know. it really doesn't tell you that when you get into recurring billing too. fun times.