Oh, don't you like to store countless redundant products or products you made by mistake? Almost everyone likes paging through tens of redundant or mistaken products in the UI when creating a new plan! Didn't you know?
Good luck setting an ID on a new replacement product again if you made a mistake with the product name. Since you can't change the name for the product that has taken your application generated ID hostage, you end up losing that ID and you'd better have an application that is flexible with changing ID's that are issued out to create products via the API. Or maybe prepend/append a number and make it more complicated for yourself if you are the one who has access to your applications code.
It would be more than nice to supply the capability to use at least ONE custom field that can be populated with application information that you might need later by an API call. It would remove the need for an independent data server having to store Paypal product ID's and custom field data so that applications can function without resorting to the non-sense of looking up multiple sources of truth to get information about products and plans.
It's a brilliant API, they must have really gone postal on this one after developers like me have written comments like these in the past. I never thought I would be close to finally meeting my maker through the use of my own hands tightly gripping my own neck!
It's easier for me to convince my clients to not use Paypal as a payment method than it is to hack together a Subscriptions API Frankensteins monster application and then deal with the client complaining that they can't delete Products and Plans from the UI.
So many companies below 1 billion dollars in market value can do API's right, but this one for some reason can't.
Thanks Paypal.
