Okay, well you know that you can get the same exact direct credit card processing experience from PayPal that you get from Stripe? However, the fees are typically lower, the payment holds are fewer (Stripe holds almost everything for 2 weeks if I remember correctly..??), and then everything would drop into a single account instead of dealing with two separate processing accounts. This can save time for your bookkeeper.
The reason this "just works" with credit cards is because those types of processing accounts typically come with "reference transactions" fully accessible as soon as you're approved for the account itself. This is true of Stripe and also true of PayPal Pro / Braintree, which are PayPal's options for direct card processing like Stripe.
When you're using actual PayPal Wallet, though, where people log in to a PayPal account for payment, there's an extra step involved. You need to create a "Billing Agreement" that you would keep on file for the buyer, and that Billing Agreement ID is what would be used for future Reference Transactions.
With direct credit cards, you would just pass the transaction ID from a previous Authorization or Sale transaction into the future Reference Transaction request, and it would work. With PayPal you need this Billing Agreement ID, showing that the customer fully agreed to give you this access to charge them accordingly in the future.
This gives you a lot of power. You can charge the customer ANY amount at ANY time. Even legitimate sellers/developers have caused big problems from this. Imagine a bug in your software that accidentally loops through the same accounts multiple times, and dings them numerous times in a single run. Yuck! I've seen it happen.
In order to get approved for Billing Agreements / Reference Transactions for PayPal payments, you need to get this specifically approved and activated on your PayPal account. This can be difficult because of that power that it gives you. For this you would need to contact PayPal directly and get them to vet you for this approval.
Once approved, you can use the PayPal APIs to build all of this out accordingly. You would send the user through PayPal for the billing agreement, store their billing agreement ID in their user profile, and then use that ID to process future payments on whatever schedule you need to.
If you happen to be using WordPress / WooCommerce, then you can look at our PayPal for WooCommerce plugin, which fully supports all of this (assuming it's approved on your account.)
If you're not using WordPress, then of course you can build all of this functionality out into your own checkout flow. Hope that helps clarify things for you!
Angell EYE -
www.angelleye.comPayPal Partner and Certified Developer - Kudos are Greatly Appreciated!
