Introduction: Hacks #61-64
Being
paid
once is a fine thing, but being paid repeatedly is fabulous. With a
PayPal subscription button, you can offer your customers the chance
to pay you again and again without any further human intervention.
Subscription buttons allow you to collect automatically recurring
payments easily for such things as club membership dues and monthly
access to online content.
As mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 4,
PayPal provides a tool to create subscription buttons for your site.
Like ordinary Buy Now buttons, these are nothing more than HTML forms
that can be placed on your pages. A customer clicks a Subscribe Now
button to go to the PayPal site to confirm the new subscription, and
the recurring payments begin.
For complete information about subscriptions and subscription
buttons, see PayPal's
Subscriptions and Recurring Payments
Manual, available from within your PayPal account under the Merchant
Tools tab. For now, keep a few facts in mind as you read this
chapter:
PayPal offers no facility for storing your content or for digital
rights management (DRM) of your electronic resources. PayPal simply
triggers regular payments from your buyers to you. Subscriptions can be
canceled
at any time by either you or your buyer. Use this as a selling point
when asking customers to sign up. They will not require your
cooperation if they decide to end the recurring payment.
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If you turn on Instant Payment Notification (IPN) [Hack #65],
notice of any changes to your active subscriptions, such as
cancellations, payments, or new subscriptions, will be sent to the
IPN script you specify, and your server can take immediate action as
necessary.
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