When you use PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring Payments, your customers can purchase automatically recurring subscriptions from your website, or even using a link in an email.

Subscriptions and Recurring Payments is a low-cost way for you to accept credit card and bank account payments for content site subscriptions, newsletter fees, club dues, or recurring donations, and can be fully integrated with your website in a few easy steps. Subscriptions and Recurring Payments is only available for Business or Premier accounts.

What are the benefits?

Save time and money with PayPal’s hassle-free Subscriptions and Recurring Payments:

  • Easy to implement – flexible and automatic billing frees you from sending invoices
  • No up-front costs – you’ll enjoy the same low fee schedule each time you receive other PayPal payments
  • Sell with ease – PayPal maintains detailed transaction records on our website
  • Improve buyer experience – with customisable buttons and secure payments, happy customers become repeat customers

Subscriptions and Recurring Payments Paypal Button

PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring Payments are easy to set up and use:

  1. Log in to your Premier or Business PayPal account.
  2. Click on the Merchant Services tab
  3. Click on the Subscriptions and Recurring Payments link
  4. Specify the name, billing cycle, price and other details of the item you wish to sell
  5. Add more optional information such as postage and packaging, VAT, and option fields (for size, colour, weight, etc.)
  6. Click Create Button Now and the Button Factory will generate customised HTML code
  7. Paste the HTML code on your website to create your Subscribe and Cancel Subscription buttons.

When a buyer clicks the Subscribe button, s/he will be taken to a secure PayPal payment page, where s/he can log in to an existing PayPal account or sign up for a new one, and quickly complete the payment.

Subscriptions and Recurring Payments HTML Code

Experienced HTML users can bypass the Button Factory and create their own PayPal Shopping Cart payment buttons by altering the HTML code directly. The sample code below shows the minimum information you need to create an Add to Cart button (in this case, to purchase a newsletter subscription billed $7.00 USD per month):
<form name="_xclick" action="https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/websc" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick-subscriptions">
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="prashant.walke_buz@testpaypal.com">
<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
<input type="hidden" name="no_shipping" value="1">
<input type="image" src="http://www.paypal.com/en_GB/i/btn/x-click-but20.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
<input type="hidden" name="a3" value="7.00">
<input type="hidden" name="p3" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="t3" value="M">
<input type="hidden" name="src" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="sra" value="1">
</form>
paypalPasting the above code into your website would generate a button that looks like this:
If you dynamically generate portions of your site, you can create Subscribe buttons dynamically and save time by updating the variables with information from your database. To use the button above for a different subscription, you would only need to edit three variables:

  • a3 – amount to be invoiced each recurrence
  • t3 – time period (D=days, W=weeks, M=months, Y=years)
  • p3 – number of time periods between each recurrence

For the example above, the variables would be:
$7.00 USD (a3) every 1 (p3) month (t3)