Let's talk about Payflow and recurring payments

First of all, Payflow is only a payment gateway, one must have a Merchant Account; which may not be that easy to acquire and will have its own fees such as monthly reports.  So is the only way to have recurring payments is to use Payflow and obtain a Merchant Account?

I don't even know how this payflow will help us

by making the money to flow towards you.

 well it seems it wont flow that easy coz they need me to in US before i can process their merchant account

All jokes aside, how about the topic question?  I am not going to try and acquire a merchant account, did that years ago and the monthly fees were too much.

 i must be in u.s to work with Payflow?

 Payflow refers to a suite of products. The following table explains the main differences between these products:

SOURCE https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/products/payflow-gateway/

to what i see here no charges to merchant account holder.

I am only talking about Payflow.  Payflow is only a payment gateway.  If you don't know what that is, then don't enter the conversation.  The question is about recurring payments and if the only option to have recurring payments is to use Payflow.  

If someone wrote support for it I think PayPal Adaptive Payments would work for recurring payments like Subscriptions, and all you need for that I believe is a Business PayPal Account.

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/products/adaptive-payments/

PayFlow is currently the only PayPal product that is designed to handle recurring payments properly. It is a gateways, yes, but it can use your PayPal Business account as a merchant account. In fact using it with anything else is asking for trouble. 

This is a GIANT topic actually, but on very very relevant and pressing issue. PayPal is a great system, but it's comprised of all sorts of products that are doing somewhat similar things, so it's often hard to understand what's doing what. Note, that they also acquired Braintree now, so that's another way of handling recurring payment.

Note that here at Boonex we are using Stripe. We chose PayPal for Dolphin because it has wider range of supported countries, but  we understand that we will need to work more on putting together a more universal solution. We think about integrating OmniPay library and allow various gateways, but handling recurring payments is still going to be a challenge. 

The catch here is that you don't want to store people's credit cards yourself. It's a big no-no unless your have the name to impute trust and the budget to build mega-secure infrastructure. So, we need to relay processing to the gateway. This complicates setup, because plans have to be created in the gateways and then integrated back into Dolphin. Lots of potential failure points already. Some gateways shoulder a bit more than others - dunning, refunds, pro-rated billing, etc, but integration is still quite custom. We have some ideas and we've learned a lot in the last month that we've been offering Subscriptions here at Boonex, so we plan to test things out on Trident in the next 3-4 months and then we'll add a more comprehensive recurring billing system to Dolphin. 

Thanks Andrew for answering this question.  PayPal is not clear that one can use their Business Account as a Merchant; however, what is new on that point.  PayPal makes you jump through all kinds of hoops to get questions answered.

The catch here is that you don't want to store people's credit cards yourself.

Look at how many big name companies have gotten hacked over the last few years and customers info stolen.

 can we please have stripe for dolphin, i know that this has been asked for several times already

 Yes, we will definitely integrate it, thought likely via OmniPay library. There's still a bit of learning and experimenting that we need to do before we can confidently use it. Stripe has great API and documentation, but it is generally geared towards custom setups. Building it into a generic site CMS isn't very straightforward. 

I have been trying to get Paypal Payflow working for days, with no success. I have gone all through the site and set every setting that applys to Paypal or Payflow.

I get the following error message:

This transaction is invalid. Please return to the recipient's website to complete your transaction using their regular checkout flow.

What am I doing wrong? Is this a setting in the paypal account that is incorrect? Can someone offer step by step instructions on how to set up Paypal Payflow in Dolphin and also how to set it up in the paypal account? Obviously I am missing something but I have no clue what.

Thanks,

Dan

Membership/Subscription Management module by Martinboi does recurring paypal payments.

https://www.boonex.com/m/Dolphin_7_Membership_Subscriptions_Module

7.2.1 compatibility not specified but works for me.