Magento Paypal Recurring payments is a great way for store owners to offer products with installment plans, subscriptions, etc.

But, Magento supports such payments only via Paypal Express Checkout.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests from website owners to setup Magento Paypal Recurring Payments feature as part of our Outsourced Technical Support for web hosts.

Today, let’s discuss the steps to configure Magento Paypal recurring payments feature.

What’s ‘Recurring Payments’ aka ‘Recurring Profiles’?

Recurring Payments aka Recurring Profiles help store owners to sell a product and grab regular payments.

For example, Magento store owners can sell a magazine subscription and charge it monthly with the Recurring Payment option.

In other words, Recurring Profile is an accounting record containing the following information.

• Start date of subscription
• How often payment has to be taken
• End date of subscription

So, when a product is set to Recurring Profile option, customers are redirected to the Paypal payment system.

Further, Paypal will create a Recurring payment agreement to authorize them to charge the customer according to the specified billing cycle.

How to setup Magento Paypal Recurring Payments?

Recurring Payments must be set for each product in the store.

Let’s discuss the steps to enable Magento Paypal recurring payments in Magento 1.x.

Magento 1.x

Here are the 5 important steps to configure Recurring Payment in Magento 1.x versions.

a) Enable Recurring Profile

Our Support Engineers setup Recurring Payments through the Magento admin panel using the following steps.

• Go to Catalog > Manage Products
• After that, select the desired product and click on it to open it for editing.
• Then, select Recurring Profile option.
• Set Enable Recurring Profile option to Yes.

Enable Recurring Profile

b) Configure the Schedule panel

Magento store owners can set the payment schedule in the Schedule panel.

There are 4 settings in this Schedule panel.

• Customer can define start date – This allows shoppers to set the payment start date. If not, the start date will be the date of purchase.
• Schedule description – Short description of recurring payment and users see this when they order the product.
• Max Payment failures – Number of times the payment can fail before the recurring profile is suspended.
• Auto bill on next cycle – Enable/disable automatic billing in the next billing cycle for failed payments.

Magento Recurring Profile Schedule panel

Next, move on to the Billing panel.

c) Configure the Billing panel

Similarly, Magento store owners can specify the Billing settings of the Recurring profile.

There are 3 sections in the Billing panel.

• Billing Period Unit – Unit for billing during the subscription period and it can be daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
• Billing Frequency – Number of billing periods that make up a billing cycle.
• Maximum Billing Cycles – The number of billing cycles for the payment period. If left blank, the customer will be charged until the recurring profile is canceled.

Magento Recurring Profile Billing panel

d) Configure Trial period

This section is optional and store owners can use this section to offer a trial period for the product.

There are 4 sections here.

• Trial Billing Period Unit  – Unit for billing during the trial period and it can be daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
• Trial Billing Frequency – How often payments will be initiated during the trial period.
• Maximum Trial Billing Cycle – Maximum number of payments allowed during the trial period.
• Trial Billing Amount – Price of the product during the trial period.

Magento Recurring Profile Trial period

e) Configure Initial Fees

Finally, in this section store owners can specify the amount that customer is charged at the time of purchase.

There are 2 sections here.

• Initial Fee – Amount that customer is charged at the time of purchase. This amount is paid only once during the life of a subscription.
• Allow initial fee failure – This decides whether to suspend the payment profile if the initial fee fails or add it to the outstanding balance.

Magento Recurring Profile Initial Fee

Finally, save the changes. You are done with the Magento Paypal recurring payments setup!!

Now, let’s see how this feature works in Magento 2.

Magento 2

Recurring Payments module has been removed in Magento 2.

So, to enable this functionality, store owners must use any third party modules.

There are hundreds of Subscription and Recurring Payments extensions like Cryozonic, Exto, etc. available in market.

At Bobcares, our Support Engineers help store owners to select appropriate plugins after assessing their business requirements.

Conclusion

In short, Magento Paypal Recurring payments is a great way for store owners to offer products with installment plans, subscriptions, etc. Today, we’ve discussed how our Support Engineers assist Magento store owners to setup Recurring profile for their products.