My understanding of it, and I’ve really looked into this, is that ‘recurring payments’ is the term used for any of the recurring payment services offered by PayPal. This covers ‘subscriptions’, ‘auto billing’ and ‘instalment plans’. Auto billing is the one they are retiring. Auto billing is where someone sets a billing limit each month, and you can bill them each month, any random amount up to that limit for your product or service. So you manually trigger the bill, and it automatically pays you from the customer’s chosen funding source. Subscriptions (which is what my company uses, and what I’ve been stressing like hell about) is just that, a set monthly subscription that automatically processes at the same amount and the same time every month. An instalment plan is a plan set up to allow the customer to pay for a product or service in instalments, rather than one lump sum. The only thing that’s affected according to every bit of official info I can find, is the auto billing, and customer care assured me that ONLY auto billing is being retired, and all other recurring payment methods remain unaffected. Which means our subscriptions will remain live and we get to stay afloat!
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