PayPal For Dummies

Chapter 15

Adding Subscriptions and Recurring Payments to Your Web Site

In This Chapter

• Creating Subscription buttons
• Comprehending the payment flow
• Ending subscriptions and recurring payments
• Modifying the HTML code for subscriptions

If you sell an ongoing service (such as a newsletter or Web hosting), the PayPal Subscription and Recurring Payments feature can free you from the task of sending an invoice each month. You can offer your buyers a free trial period or special introductory rates before regular billing rates begin. The feature can also be used when you sell an expensive product and want to offer your buyers the option of paying over time.

Another reason to use PayPal is because the fee structure is the same as for any PayPal sale — you pay a $0.30 transaction fee, plus 2.9 percent of the sale price (less if you have high monthly volume and have applied for PayPal's discounted merchant rates). In Chapter 14, I show you how easy it is to add e-commerce functionality to your Web site by creating Buy Now buttons. In this chapter, I show you how to add support for multiple payments, whether they're ongoing or last only for a certain time period.

PayPal does provide some support for generating usernames and passwords, which you use to access subscriber-only content stored in a password-protected Web site folder, but PayPal does not facilitate storing or encrypting your intellectual property (that is, the files you want to sell). If you need a company that can provide ...