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I think the best thing to do with PayPal if you're doing an ongoing subscription with different plan levels or addons, is to use Pre-Approved Payments. This bas
by silverlight 10y ago
I think the best thing to do with PayPal if you're doing an ongoing subscription with different plan levels or addons, is to use Pre-Approved Payments. This basically allows you to get a PayPal token which you can use like a Stripe token -- that is, you can tell PayPal "here's this token, I need to charge it $4.99" and they will do so anytime you ask.
As you might expect, they watch companies using this type of API very closely so obviously don't use abuse it. But we've been using it from around a year now with Roll20 an d have had great success with it. It allows our customers to link their PayPal account to their Roll20 account one time, and then buy subscriptions or digital one-off content without needing to log into PayPal again or anything like that, just as if they had a stored credit card on file with our Stripe integration.
The benefit from the consumer side is that you can log into your PayPal account at any time, and see exactly when and how much you've been charged over the life of the relationship, plus end the relationship on the PayPal side with one click. So it's really a win-win I think.
Note that we also do offer using a regular PayPal checkout flow for one-off content if you're not a subscriber, but as soon as someone wants to get on a subscription plan we have them do the pre-approved payments agreement with us.