PayPal Donations Recurring
The PayPal Donations gateway fully supports the Recurring Donations add-on for accepting recurring donations with GiveWP. This document walks through the integration.
Requirements
In order to accept recurring donations with the PayPal Donations gateway, you need to have installed and activated the Recurring Donations add-on for GiveWP. Once you do that, no additional configuration of PayPal or the Recurring Donations add-on is required to immediately begin accepting recurring donations, as long as you have successfully connected to PayPal Donations.
Managing Subscriptions at PayPal
The Recurring donations add-on creates a Subscription on PayPal’s side for both subscriptions created with the PayPal Smart Buttons and those created with the credit card fields displayed directly on the page. You can manage those subscriptions from the back end of GiveWP and from your PayPal dashboard.
Due to restrictions on PayPal’s side, you can’t sync subscriptions if renewals get out of sync, but you can manually add them using the “Add Renewal” button on the back end of an individual subscription.
FAQ
The GiveWP integration uses PayPal’s Commerce API in the PayPal Donations gateway. Because of the way that API works, which fields show for recurring donations varies by the location/country of the PayPal account. The short and slightly technical version of the story is that GiveWP facilitates the connection to PayPal, and then based on information received back from PayPal enables the correct fields on the donation form. Some countries do not support the PayPal fields for security, the fields are loaded directly from PayPal, based on which ones are available to the account. The GiveWP team has no control over which fields display.
There’s no current way to access transaction history over the PayPal Commerce API. Until that support is added on PayPal’s side, there is no way to sync that data to GiveWP.
Donors can cancel subscriptions on the Recurring Donations tab of their Donor Dashboard, but they cannot currently update the amount or payment method, as is possible with some other Credit Card gateways like Stripe. In order to change the amount or payment method of a recurring donation, they’ll need to cancel and start a new one.
