Paypal recurring payment status

Question

I’m trying to set up a recurring billing situation with Paypal using Rails with ActiveMerchant and the ruby-paypal gem. Wondering how the status of subscriptions is commonly managed - IPN? Or a cron job to check the status of all subscriptions?

Answer 1

In the SaaS Rails Kit I set up a recurring billing profile in PayPal then use a cron job to check on the status of that profile when it is time for it to be billed.

Another approach is to use reference transactions (aka billing agreements) and then using a cron job to bill that paypal user when and what you want. This was my initial implementation in the SaaS Kit, but a lot of people didn't like the hassle of getting reference transactions turned on for their PayPal accounts.