Offering a free amount of time with a promo code on PayPal Standard

[recurringpay]

I have a dating website that charges a fixed monthly fee. I want to capture credit card information at the same time the customer enters a promo code. Then when the time off the promo code expires, be it a a month or two months, I want the credit card to be charged monthly. How can I achieve this with PayPal Standard?

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi recurringpay,

Welcome! 🙂

When you're creating the PayPal Subscription Button, there's an option to enable trial periods for that subscription.  Collecting the promo code and changing the button to enable the trial period would require some custom coding on your website to make changes to the PayPal button variables depending on if a valid promo code is entered.

Learn more about the recurring payment variables here:

HTML Variables for Recurring Payments Buttons

So your website would need to collect the code then modify the a1, p1, t1 and/or a2, p2, t2 variables in the button code depending which code was entered.  See the link above for a description of these variables.

You wouldn't need to capture the card information as PayPal does that automatically with PayPal Payments Standard.  When the customer completes checkout, there would be a recurring payment profile created which would automatically start the billing after the set trial period(s).  The customers would have the ability to cancel that subscription at any time through PayPal after it was created so I also recommend using Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) to ensure that your website is receiving updates when these subscriptions are being cancelled.

I hope this helps to get you started on the right track. 🙂

- Frank

[recurringpay]

@PayPal_Frank: How difficult is it for a developer to implement variables surrounding promo codes that result in trial periods?