Some guidence with paypal - setting up recurring payments

Howdee zenners!

My business has decided that it'd be a good idea to offer layaway/layby as an option for purchasing on our website, due to the expensive nature of the items we stock.

We currently ONLY accept payments via Paypal IPN (considering express checkout instead as i've just updated from a version which didn't support it).

Anyway, i know there are 2 contributions which support layaway, but they don't quite fit the bill.

I'm going to try my hand at writing my own payment module to manage layaway...

I've got most of the stuff i need to do in order, but I am wondering if there is anyway i can make paypal take recurring payments...

A typical layaway would be set up as such:

Customer fills their cart, selects the layaway option... a layaway processing fee is then added and they are prompted to enter a deposit amount (minimum will be for example, 25%...)

customer would then pay their deposit amount via paypal as per normal.

What i need to then do, is have the layaway module divide the remaining amount to be paid by the number of repayments, and charge their paypal account that amount on the date required.

Is this possible? is it possible to take authorisations for future payments from paypal, or would i be better off setting reminder emails and having the customer manually make their payments?

any pointing in the right direction would be much appreciated :)

zen cart doesnt work with recurring payments

Merlinpa1969:

zen cart doesnt work with recurring payments

I realise this - hence why i'm writing a payment module and associated code to manage that.

More to the point, will paypal allow recurring payments... i.e. if i hack zen cart such that it will attempt to charge a customer a recurring amount, will paypal play ball, or does each transaction require customer authorisation.

the way that you would need to do this is to send the order to paypal as a subscription, with a set number of payments,

so you would need to have 2 of each product
1 as a pay outright and 1 as a layaway that you tell it the number of payments and how much each payment will be.

so you will have to do more than a few simple hacks,
you will need to create a new product type and a clone of the paypal module

once again one thats for pay outright and one thats set on an IF and only works with subscriptions ( layaways )