Recurring payments is an important feature for many types of businesses, and we now have a solid, robust set of APIs for this functionality that offer recurring payment service for PayPal Express Checkout and Website Payments Pro merchants with U.S. PayPal accounts. We invite you to try out these new APIs and give us feedback on their performance and how well they meet your needs.
Documentation. The Integration Center has all the information on the new APIs. One piece of info that is missing (but will be updated soon) is that you must include VERSION=50.0 in all of your API calls, or else you will get an error. This is pursuant to our new API versioning scheme we introduced last month.
Qualification. For PayPal account payments, any account with API access can create recurring payment transactions. For Direct Payment (credit card) payments, you must first be using Website Payments Pro (US version) to register for this service. If you use Pro, here is the sign up page.
Fees. For PayPal account payments, there is no fee for using these APIs. For Direct Payment (credit card) payments, the service is free until May. After that, there is a $30/month charge for the service. Regular PayPal transaction fees also apply.
Feedback. This feature is in pilot mode right now. That means that all the functionality is there, but we're soliciting feedback before the full roll out. Please let us know what you think of this new service!
