Paypal DoDirectPayment without user present (e.g. with cron job)

Question

Is it possible to make Paypal payments using stored user's data (credit card info, name, address etc.) within cron job or other script execution without actual user present?

I want to implement autopayments on my service but I can not to use standard Paypal autocharge functionality because of its complexity.

Answer 1

What you're looking for is called Reference Transactions. You can use the DoReferenceTransaction API to accomplish your goal.

Using this API you simply pass in the transaction ID of a previous Authorization or Sale transaction along with a new amount you'd like to process. It will lookup the billing info saved on PayPal's system using that previous transaction ID, and then process the same source for the new transaction.

This works with both Payments Pro and Express Checkout.

I noticed you posted this with the adaptive payments tag, too. That would be the Preapproval API and the Pay API, but would not involve DoDirectPayment.