Paypal Payments Pro and Payflow Pro

We recently purchased your S2member Pro ugprade. In the middle of all this we signed up for a PayPal Payments Pro account. After setting up the pro account, we integrated the API keys just as S2member asks for. When trying to setup recurring billing, we were getting an error saying that the recurring billing wasn’t enabled on our PayPal account after some digging around. That being said, we were instructed to go to the PayPal manager and activate recurring billing. Having done that, it still doesn’t work and is throwing the same error code.

After 5 run around phone calls with PayPal and over 4 hours spent on the phone and 3 emails later, we were told PayPal is no long running the Website Payments Pro 3.0 account. The new accounts to accept recurring billing are PayPal Payments Pro along with the Payflow account. They informed us that they cannot sign a customer up for an older Website Payments Pro account and that the new Payflow system is it. They are making some major changes over there right now. All of this being said, here we sit with a membership platform that we can’t take recurring payments on.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

Hi Rich.

Thanks for the heads up on this! I’m informing Jason, the Lead Developer, about this right now. He should get to my email soon, I’ll post back when I hear back from him.

Thanks for your patience. :)

Thanks for the heads up on this thread.
~ Yes, that would certainly be news to us.

I’m not aware of any change in this regard. However, I will follow-up on this with PayPal just to double-check, and also to find out why you had the experience that you did. I’ve posted an inquiry here which you’re welcome to follow along with. I’ll update this thread once I have confirmation. See: https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/forums/website-payments-pro/paypal-payments-pro-recurring-billing

Note. All existing documentation and product info indicates that PayPal is and will continue to offer Recurring Billing for PayPal Pro accounts. If they have plans to discontinue this service, we’d certainly like to confirm that officially. If I don’t receive confirmation in the next 48 hours, we will take this to the next level.

Jason thank you for the response on this issue. They had informed us at PayPal anyone with a current Website Payments Pro account that had initially signed up for recurring billing will still be eligible to use that account and they will not shut them down. They are “grandfathered” in. Anyone signing up for a new account moving forward will be faced with the same situation we were. If you can pull some strings somehow and get the original recurring billing linked to our Website Payments Pro account instead of the Payflow version that would be awesome! Please keep us informed. Thank you.

Update: This is being escalated to the next level so we can get confirmation from PayPal.

Support ticket filed with PayPal Developer Technical Support.
~ Awaiting response from PayPal within 24 hours.

Referencing this thread in communication with PayPal MTS and Developer Support.

Great, thank you for all your help here Jason!

UPDATE: PayPal Developer Support reported back, and we are currently working with them to resolve this. I should have an more detailed update for you later today.

So sorry for the delayed response.

I have spoken with PayPal Developer support, and I can confirm that this is indeed the case. Applications previously written to support DPRP through PayPal Pro will no longer work for brand new merchants signing up for PayPal (i.e. signing up for the first time).

In other words, PayPal’s API doc here, no longer apply to new merchants.

This is typical of PayPal. It’s so nice of them to have different APIs for each of their customers, based on the date each customer signs up. Brilliant stuff going on over there!

In short, this means that brand new PayPal Pro accounts, will be sold with the Payflow edition to handle Recurring Billing, and DPRP will not be sold to these accounts. These brand new accounts will need to integrate with Payflow instead (if they wan’t to bill on a recurring basis), following this documentation.

PayPal has said they have NO plans to discountinue support for DPRP in any existing PayPal accounts operating under a Pro status. However, all new PayPal Pro accounts come with a different API to deal with Recurring Billing, which is called Payflow.

The next generation of s2Member will be designed to support the Payflow API for Recurring Billing. Until the next major release of s2Member Pro, current versions of s2Member Pro will require that a merchant has an existing PayPal account, with the ability to acquire a PayPal Pro account with DPRP enabled.

@Rich. PayPal Developer Support said this when I asked about your account specifically.

Unfortunately the approvals for our different account types are done in another department. I would suggest having your merchant contact PayPal Merchant Solutions at 1-888-215-5506
Sincerely, Nathan / Merchant Technical Support / PayPal, an eBay Company

I interpret this as, NO. They can’t (or will not) change your account. Rich, if we can be of further assistance, please contact me directly via: s2Member® » Private Contact Form

Summary:

Existing PayPal accounts holders should NOT be affected by this change, and all aspects of s2Member and s2Member Pro will continue to function as they should. DPRP (Direct Pay / Recurring Billing) service continues to function in existing PayPal Pro accounts, as do other aspects of s2Member Pro integration.

New PayPal Pro accounts will be sold with the Payflow edition. New PayPal Pro accounts will continue to function with all aspects of both s2Member and s2Member Pro; but with one important exception. If Recurring Billing service is needed, you will have the Payflow edition, which is NOT compatible with current versions of s2Member Pro. We are working to integrate with Payflow, so this issue can avoided going forward. In the mean time, if you find yourself in this precarious position, we suggest using Authorize.Net (it supports recurring billing) – instead of PayPal Pro; until such time as s2Member Pro can be updated to support the Payflow API.

This thread will be updated once s2Member Pro supports the Payflow API.

Do you have an estimated release date for Payflow support?

He’s working on that now. :)

Definitely let us know as soon as possible! We have a site launching on May 19th and we were getting ready to sign up for Paypal Pro, but it looks like we’ll have to use authorize.net now. Once s2members is updated, would it be hard to switch back to paypal?

Well, you’d need your customers to signup again with the PayPal service and then cancel the Auth.Net subscription. You’ll probably need to adjust the initial/trial period to compensate for the inconvenience or any paid time they had left.

Thank you for the update! We’ll stay tuned and wait for your release. Your help and time is very much appreciated.

any updates on this? Authorize.net makes you use extend a personal financial guarantee, which we do not like the idea of doing, we would much rather use Paypal. Thank you!

Hi James.

Yeah, it’s definitely a nicer option to use. We’ll let you know when this is ready. :)

UPDATE: s2Member® Pro v120514 now supports the Payflow® API for Recurring Billing.
s2Member® Unified Changelog » v120514

thank you! You sir, are a saint!