IanKelley - 7:59 pm on Jul 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

A note about PayPal... Their system is easy to use and IPN makes it easy to integrate into your own system.

However when it comes to subscriptions their system hasn't been updated, or apparently even looked at, for quite some time.

If a subscriber that has an actual PayPal account (pretty common, these) removes a credit card from their account (even if the subscription payments are setup to come out of their balance and/or bank account) the subscription is cancelled immediately. Subscriptions are also cancelled if a user changes their credit card information by adding a new card or switching their primary card.

Sometimes it seems like subscriptions are cancelled for even more esoteric reasons, possibly involving sunspots. When it happens the user is notified only via email.

So keep in mind that if you use PayPal to handle a large number of subscriptions you're going to be spending a lot of time manually dealing with subscription cancellations that the user may not even know about and/or writing the extra code to automate the process.