Paypal Recurring Payments M'boi Membership Pro

I ran into an issue when testing a membership upgrade purchase. Apparently Paypal has a deal where you can not purchase a membership upgrade if the cost is more that 20% increase from the current membership. Has anyone else ran into this problem? If, so, how can we get around it. It does not seem logical, as we have 3 membership options, Basic - 1.99/month, Advanced - 4.99/month, Premier - 14.99/month. So, with Paypals new API, we would have to either decrease the cost of our Advanced and Premier memberships or increase the costs of our Basic and Advanced memberships. Neither option would really be suitable. Any assistance in figuring out a workaround would be greatly appreaciated. Here is the link to PayPal explaining things: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/digital-goods/ECDGRecurringPayments/

This does not make any sense, why should PayPal care what you charge as long as they are getting their share?  Are you sure that is the problem?  Have you talked directly with PayPal and asked them?

when the upgrade attempt was made there was an error that came up on Paypals site, saying "Amount can only be increased by 20%" with a button to return to merchants site. So I searched paypal for the 20%, and that is the page that I found. After reading that page, it sounds as if they are saying that (for me at least) if a person purchasses the 1.99 membership, they can not upgrade to the 4.99 membership for at least 180 days. So those that want to upgrade are stuck at the 1.99 membership for 6 months.

Maybe we need to tell PayPal to go f itself.  I have been talking to someone that says Intuit payments are the way to go.  You can use Authorize.net with Intuit.  I know a lot of people don't like paying through PayPal even if using a credit card.  The fees with Intuit seems to be along the lines of PayPal.

In short, paypal wants to dictate what & how much you can charge YOUR members on YOUR site?  These corporations really have their heads stuck too far up their arse.

that is just the way I read it. I dont know if that is accurate. I am hoping one of these profitable dolphin site owners can shed some light on how they handle recurring payments (crosses fingers)

The mod i was thinking of designing was to be a replacement for dolphins membership module. Basically similar to the default membership module but all allow the use of subscriptions using paypals subscription service which i don't think has the same restrictions as recurring payments.

It's not a easy to manage tho. Subscriptions are not handled through a API, so it's a bit tricky as a member would have to cancel the current subscription before changing to a new one.

I am still researching options. I planned on implementing subscriptions on my own website first for a new site project i have planned. So i'll have to see how it goes.

 i'm based in the UK and intuit fees are cheaper than paypal, intuit charge a flat rate of 2.75% paypal charge me 20pence + 3.4% also if you want to take debit and credit card payments over the phone or email etc, i would have to upgrade my paypal account and pay them £20 per month, intuit offer this facility for free!

has anyone tried 2Checkout or Authorize.net for recurring membership payments?

We use 2Checkout (and PayPal) for Zarconia and it works just fine for recurring. It's not a 'simple' process to get an account like it is at PayPal for example. There is an application process, 'soft' background check, and other website criteria that has to be met. Not sure how easy it would be for someone who just wanted it for their Dolphin site. 

Authorize.net was too expensive for us to consider.

@ Zarcon, how do you get around the 180 day 20% increase liitation with PayPal, or do you only offer one membership purchase option?

 Not sure I follow what you are saying. I have not seen an increase to our Business PayPal account as of yet (or that I have noticed). We offer our customers 4 different payment options such as monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annually. We support those options with either PayPal or 2Checkout.

Edit: Also, I am not talking about a Dolphin website, I am talking about our hosting company Zarconia.net (not a dolphin site)

The issue seems to be a Paypal one. Apparently some time back they added limitations to recurring payments. The way I read it is that a user cannot purchase a new 'membership' with a recurring payment that is more than a 20% increase of the original recurring payment - for 180 days.

I realized this when testing the membership purchasing and then attempting to upgrade to a higher level membership. I received an error saying "Amount can only be increased by 20%". After searching for this error message, I found the following page in PayPal.

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/digital-goods/ECDGRecurringPayments/.

will have to look into this as Im just about to launch a site that uses recurring payments for membership... never had this issue before?

Would gladly welcome a decent alternative to paypal though if there is one!

ALSO - DEANO - very interested to hear you're working on an alternative membership / payment system!!! 

are you open to suggestions of features to include if possible? :-)

it just doesn't make sense to impose such a limitation. Our membership options are 1.99/month, 4.99/month, and 14.99 per month. And with this new limitation, we would have to decrease our 14.99 membership to just 2.38/month, increase our basic membership to 12.50/month, or the user is stuck for 6 months with the current membership, or we just use one membership. Our first choice is to just go with one membership - which we know is going to bite us in the arse, because we are going to lose all of those who just want to 'try it out for cheap'.

I know someone out there in the world has recurring payments that have more than a 20% increase between membership options - so how do they accomplish that.

Apparently there is a way around it.

Supposedly there is no limits like that imposed if you have the $30 per month Paypal Payments Pro account.

These limits exist in the Recurring Payments API in all versions.

• A profile can have at most one optional trial period and a single regular payment period.
• The profile start date may not be earlier than the profile creation date.

These are the limits imposed on the standard Recurring Payments with Express Checkout. but not on the pro version.

• 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.

So i guess giving paypal more money is the only way around it.

Or try to find a different payment processor.  I have not looked into Intuit in depth yet but I intend to.

I think you have to own their extremely expensive Quickbooks software before you can use any of their services. Just a guess.

Thanks Deano - I really appreciate you taking the time to look at that and clarifying it for me - I can deal with paying the $30 a month to lift the limitation because hopefully our income will pay for it.

 can't speak for the rest of the world but in the U.K. you do not have to have their Quickbooks software, here's the link to their U.K. page about accepting credit/debit card payments: http://www.intuit.co.uk/accept-card-payments/intuit-pay.jsp 

hopefully it's the same for everybody

Good gracious - if it isn't one thing, it's another. Went ahead and applied for the upgraded PayPal, and then ran into another snag. Originally we only had one membership, so did not notice this before. When changing memberships, the new membership does not kick in until the old membership expires. WTFlip? I had seen posts in the past referencing this, but did not pay attention to them because it wasn't relevant at that time.

This is going to be a hassle, because in order to get this to work properly, we would have to pro-rate the current membership, and then apply the difference to the purchase of the new membership. Anyone found a workaround for this?

See if you can customize the code... or hire someone to do it.  The default is to add a new membership to start when the current one expires.  You'll need to add code for membership upgrades where the new membership begins immediately, i.e. the new code will update the membership level... leaving the expiry date the same.  

 Yes, this has been explained before.  If a person purchases a membership level that is for six months and then before that membership expires buys the next level, the current level has to expire first because otherwise the member is being cheated out of time they paid.  However, the next level may offer extra features and the member may want to go ahead and upgrade without having to wait so they can start enjoying the new benefits.  Therefore, a way is needed for the member to decided if they want the new membership applied immediately, or to wait until their current membership expires (and thus forfeiting the remaining time).  This is needed; I have had to go in and manually set up a membership when someone upgraded before their current membership had expired.

I swear, I feel like an addicted gambler. Things not going my way, but too far in to turn back now. lololol. As much as I like Dolphin, the closer I get to having an aspect done, the more problems I run into it seems. Although I understand that Dolphin is just a base template and should be fine tuned to fit my needs, it just seems like so many obvious quirks should be done differently.