Long time from profile creation to first payment

[mslanzi92]

I have encountered a strange problem in my implementation of recurring payments for the company product.

When we have developed the implementation in sandox environment, I have created a recurring profile successfully and I have received the first payment in few hours; in some communities (eg. StackOverflow) I have read that this time delay was normal for some inner PayPal validations.

But in our first production test the time from profile creation to first real monthly payment has been almost 12h, so I thought that this was normal as noticed in sandbox.
The time has increased in a day or more for the other profiles created later and only during a support call to PayPal for this, we have received the payments.

PayPal support team has told us that when the profile is created, almost always we can receive the payment immediately therefore the problem can be in our implementation.
In NVP/SOAP documentation i haven't seen any field that "forces" the payment, except in the case where I set an initial amount equal to the subscription amount and start the payments one month later.
This solution isn't the best and IMHO it is not the correct method.

So I would like to know if I have to set additional parameters to the NVP call or, if the implementation is correct, if there is a way to speed up the first payment.

Kind regards

[angelleye]

In my experience the recurring payments profile can be pretty finicky.  In most cases you should see the first payment pretty quickly, but depending on the timestamps you're using it's possible things could be acting up, or it could just be a hiccup in PayPal's servers at the moment, which unfortunately does happen quite a bit with recurring payments.

Can you post a sample of the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile request you're sending?  It sounds like you're doing everything correctly, but it wouldn't hurt to review your request.

One thing you may want to look into is building your own recurring system using billing agreements / reference transactions.  This way you can trigger all payments exactly when you want to, and you'll be able to monitor everything more easily.  It takes a little bit more work on the development side to build that out, but I think you'll be glad you did in the long run.