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Im using Paypal recurring payments and Im having some issues understanding when is my first charge occurring. Im using Sandbox currently so paypal does not really send me an overview of the payment that is really happening.

I would like to create a monthly subscription that will charge the user each month 6.99$ and will start immediately.

my basic parameters are: 

BILLINGPERIOD = MONTH
AMT = 6.99
PROFILESTARTDATE = date('Y-m-d') . 'T' . date('H:i:s')
L_PATMENTREQUEST_0_ITEMCATEGORY0 = Digital

Im trying to understand if the amount 6.99 is charged on payment or will start in a month from today.

Thanks

nimi
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1 Answers1

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The profile will be created immediately and the first payment will happen that same day, but it might be a few hours before it comes through.

If you need to process the first payment immediately you can use the INITAMT parameter in your CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile request, and then you can use FAILEDINITAMTACTION to specify how you want to handle situations where the initial amount fails.

If you set things up this way you'll want to set the start date of the profile to 1 month in the future, otherwise you'd end up double billing them for the first month.

Drew Angell
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    Thanks for this guideline, Andrew. I know PayPal sends emails to both the buyer and the merchant once the profile has been created, I'm just curious, what start date of the profile will show on the emails? (emails for recurring payments are messed up in sandbox for both buyer and merchant accounts) Wouldn't the buyer be confused if he/she subscribed to a service today then the email he/she receives will be dated next month? Thanks. – Annie Lagang Oct 19 '16 at 09:37
  • What does the email say? – doz87 Nov 30 '16 at 00:15