We are currently using an old implementation of PayPal payments for donations and subscriptions (recurring donations). There have been a lot of discussions around offering users to pay their membership fees using PayPal. The solution that we currently use doesn't really support this and the workarounds we implemented negatively impact the user experience.
PayPal has since published new APIs that we should look into and assess if our existing and desired use cases can be implemented. All of this based on the requirement that we do not introduce scripts that are hosted by a third party and requested by the users' browsers.
Our use cases are
- one-time donations
- recurring donations using the subscription feature
- recurring membership fee payments (using the subscription feature) with a delayed first payment to accommodate the process of member admission. Don't use the "Trial period" feature but try to set the date of the first payment.
- changing the payment amount (and maybe payment interval) of existing subscriptions (probably not the ones that were created using the old API)
The outcome of this ticket is to
- have an understanding of how the API works
- identify the differences the API change has on what users see
- identify what changes in PayPal's response content (IPN), if any
- be able to assess the feasibility of the individual use cases
- be able to roughly estimate implementation effort
Implementation hint:
Use curl or a REST API client to document the requests we have to send to PayPal