Recently I have been working with a custom plugin for WordPress that is supposed to allow payments with PayPal Pro. The advantage of PayPal Pro integration is that you can do purchases from within your website; you don’t have to go out to the PayPal site, make the payment, then return back to the original website.
The plugin uses recurring transactions for yearly memberships. When I first tried integrating the plugin with PayPal Pro, and testing it, I received the following error message:
11586: DPRP is disabled. - DPRP is disabled for this merchant.
First off, I still don’t know what DPRP stands for. Dynamic PayPal Recurring Payment? Who knows.
Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
I did some searches on it, but couldn’t find any easy answers as to why I was receiving this error. One solution was to login to my PayPal account, then do the following:
- navigate to the “My Account -> Proile -> Instant Payment Notification Preferences“
- click on teh “Edit Settings” button
- on the “Edit Instant Payment Notification (IPN) Settings” page, enter the notification URL (in my case, the link was provided to me by the plugin I was using)
- click on the radio button titled “Receive IPN messages“
After enabling the notification url, I retested the plugin. Didn’t work.
Sign up for Recurring Transactions
Next, I read a blog that mentioned the need to add recurring transactions to PayPal Pro. I though that PayPal Pro, which costs $30 a month to use, would/should come with that feature. But, it sounds like it might cost another $20-30 dollar a month to have this feature enabled. I wasn’t able to call PayPal to find out (customer service hours were over), but plan on testing this soon.
Solution
I finally got a hold of PayPal. In order to have recurring transactions, there are two options: Enhanced Recurring Billing and Recurring Billing.
Enhanced recurring billing is an additional $20/mo. and allows you to use PayPal Standard, but include recurring billing. PayPal Standard already comes with recurring billing, but requires that the payer have a PayPal account. With Enhanced Recurring Billing, the payer still has to make the payment on the PayPal site, but it won’t require him to be a member of PayPal in order to sign up for a service that requires recurring billing.
On the other hand, if you sign up for PayPal Pro, you MUST pay an additional $30/mo. to use Recurring Billing. There is no Enhanced Recurring Billing feature with PayPal Pro. This means that you have to pay $30/mo. just to have PayPal Pro and another $30/mo. to have recurring billing on top of it.
