Advanced Features Guide

Handling Recurring Payments
Recurring Payments Terms
3
44 April 2012 Express Checkout Advanced Features Guide
Recurring Payments with Express Checkout also has the following limitations:
 To be able to create a recurring payments profile for the buyer, you must ensure that the
buyer’s PayPal account includes an active credit card.
 You can create a maximum of 10 recurring payments profiles during checkout.
 You can increase the profile amount by only 20% in each 180-day interval after you create
the profile.
Recurring Payments Terms
The following table lists and describes terms that are commonly used in the context of PayPal
recurring payments.
Recurring Payments Terms
Term Definition
Recurring payments profile Your record of a recurring transaction for a single buyer. The profile
includes all information required to automatically bill the buyer a fixed
amount of money at a fixed interval.
Billing cycle Make one payment per billing cycle. Each billing cycle has 2 components:
 The billing period specifies the unit to calculate the billing cycle (such as
days or months).
 The billing frequency specifies the number of billing periods that make
up the billing cycle.
For example, if the billing period is Month and the billing frequency is 2, the
billing cycle is 2 months. If the billing period is Week and the billing
frequency is 6, PayPal schedules the payments every 6 weeks.
Regular payment period The main subscription period for this profile, which defines a payment
amount for each billing cycle. The regular payment period begins after the
trial period, if you specify a trial period for the profile.
Trial period An optional subscription period before the regular payment period begins. A
trial period may not have the same billing cycles and payment amounts as
the regular payment period.
Payment amount The amount the buyer pays for each billing cycle.
Outstanding balance If a payment fails for any reason, PayPal adds that amount to the profile’s
outstanding balance.
Profile ID An alphanumeric string (generated by PayPal) that uniquely identifies a
recurring profile. You can specify the Profile ID in the
TransactionSearch API operation to obtain all payments associated
with the identified profile.