[Ladia, my answer to your most recent post is at the bottom] Hi all, wanted to weigh in on this topic as I have been dealing with it quite a bit these last few months. I use Website Payments Pro and we have developers who, using PayPal's API interface, have created a signup page for us that allows 'members' to pay in 'installments' (i.e. it sets up a recurring payment profile for them). We have about 325 customers on the "monthly plan", and I get about 25 'payment skipped' emails a month. It has been totally exasperating, because neither PayPal customer service nor Technical Support can definitively tell me *why* a payment was 'skipped' so that I can resolve the situation! I finally got on the phone with BOTH a customer service guy AND a tech guy yesterday, and after about an hour, I believe I have worked out a work-around. As you know, a payment will be 'skipped' and then 'retried' 5 days later. If that doesn't go through, it will be retried again in another 5 days, and if THAT doesn't go through, then it will become a 'Failed' payment. So for us, the installment payments always process on the 1st of the month. The 2nd attempt is on the 6th, and the 3rd is on the 11th. One thing to note is that as long as the transaction is in 'skipped' mode, there is no record of this in your PayPal account - the only way to know it's been skipped is because you receive an email. Nothing posts to PayPal until the payment 'fails'. So the entire transaction is in limbo for 10 days. And during those 10 days, my customers are still receiving product (they receive perishable product weekly, and so cannot 'return' it for lack of payment) and of course I don't want their accounts to be going into the red while I wait until the 11th to find out whether or not their payment will go through. So here's my work-around: For each customer that I receive a 'Payment Skipped' notice, I call them as soon as possible and 1) using Virtual Terminal, collect a payment for the installment that did not go through (so as to bring their account current) 2) I then go in and update their profile (different card, same card; doesn't matter - paypal requires you to 'Submit' the update, so if Paypal approves the update, that's all that matters) (note that if the customer is paying with their own paypal account rather than a credit card, THEY need to go into THEIR paypal account and update the linked card or bank acct info; you can't edit someone else's paypal account). 3) now there's a new problem: I've collected a payment and updated their profile... and paypal is still going to 'retry' on the 6th and 11th, so there is a risk of our customer now being *overcharged* (because I've already charged them for that installment via Virtual Terminal) SO -- 4) I go into their profile *again*, and "Suspend" it (all the info stays in the profile, just no attempts to charge will happen while the profile is 'suspended') and leave it Suspended mode until after the 11th... 5) then lastly, after the 11th, I go back into their profile *yet again* and 'reactivate' it. REMEMBER if you have several accounts like this, as I do, you'll want to keep a list somewhere of all the names so as to make sure you unsuspend them all; if you forget to unsuspend someone, they won't charge the following month. Hope that helps! PS - in response to your comment, Ladia, about paypal turning off recurring payments and your customers still being charged: here's what you have to do: any time you want to stop a customer from being charged recurring payments, you have to go into your paypal account and cancel their profile. If you don't cancel their profile, they will continue to be charged (or attempted to be charged, as you experienced). To cancel a profile, do an 'advanced search' by customer name or email to find the transaction where their profile was originally created [in the All Activity page, the Type will be "Recurring Payment From", and Payment Status will be "Created"]. IMPORTANT NOTE: to find the profile, you have to know the date it was created, because you need to search in a particular date range. Once you find the profile, however, it is easy - you just click on 'Details' and then when you're in the profile detail, click on 'Cancel'. FYI Paypal records separate transactions (i.e. separate line items) for each time a profile is Created, Updated, Canceled, Suspended or Completed, with 'Completed' meaning the installment payment went through successfully.
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