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Overview
Billing

Set up a subscription with PayPal

Learn how to create and charge for a subscription with PayPal and Checkout.

Use this guide to set up a subscription using PayPal and Checkout.

A Checkout Session represents the details of a customer’s intent to purchase. Create a Session when a customer wants to start a subscription. After redirecting a customer to a Checkout Session, Stripe presents a payment form where they can complete their purchase. After they complete a purchase, Stripe redirects them back to your site.

Caution

To start accepting PayPal subscriptions on Stripe, you need to enable PayPal recurring payments from the Dashboard.

Set up Stripe
Server-side

First, you need a Stripe account. Register now.

Use our official libraries for access to the Stripe API from your application:

Command Line
# Available as a gem
sudo gem install stripe
Gemfile
# If you use bundler, you can add this line to your Gemfile
gem 'stripe'

Create recurring products and prices

Caution

The Prices API unifies how one-time purchases and subscriptions are modeled on Stripe. Existing integrations that don’t use the Prices API are still supported. However, some Checkout features only support Prices. See the migration guide to upgrade to the Prices API.

To use Checkout, you first need to create a Product and a Price. Different physical goods or levels of service must be represented by products. Each product’s pricing is represented by one or more prices.

For example, you can create a software product that has four prices: 10 USD/month, 100 USD/year, 9 eur/month, and 90 eur/year. This allows you to change and add prices without needing to change the details of your underlying products. You can either create a product and price through the API or through the Stripe Dashboard.

If your price is determined at checkout (for example, the customer sets a donation amount) or you prefer not to create prices upfront, you can create prices inline at Checkout Session creation.

Before you start configuring products, make sure you are in test mode by toggling the View test data button at the bottom of the Stripe Dashboard. Next, define the goods and services you plan to sell. To create a new product and price:

  • Navigate to the Products section in the Dashboard
  • Click Add product
  • Select “Recurring” when setting the price
  • Configure the pricing plan

You can define multiple pricing plans with different parameters for each recurring product. Each price has a generated ID that you can use as a reference during the checkout process.

Note

Products created in test mode can be copied to live mode so that you don’t need to re-create them. In the Product detail view in the Dashboard, click Copy to live mode on the upper right corner. You can only do this once for each product created in test mode. Subsequent updates to the test product are not reflected for the live product.

Create a Checkout Session
Client-side
Server-side

Add a checkout button to your website that calls a server-side endpoint to create a Checkout Session.

index.html
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Checkout</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <form action="/create-checkout-session" method="POST">
      <button type="submit">Checkout</button>
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

Create a Session with the ID of an existing Price. Make sure that mode is set to subscription and you pass at least one recurring price. You can add one-time prices in addition to recurring prices. After creating the Checkout Session, redirect your customer to the URL returned in the response.

Command Line
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u 
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -d "payment_method_types[]"="paypal" \
  -d "line_items[][price]"=
{{PRICE_ID}}
 \
  -d "line_items[][quantity]"=1 \
  -d "mode"="subscription" \
  -d "success_url"="https://example.com/success?session_id={CHECKOUT_SESSION_ID}" \
  -d "cancel_url"="https://example.com/cancel" \

When your customer successfully completes their payment, they’re redirected to the success_url, a page on your website that informs the customer that their payment was successful. Make the Session ID available on your success page by including the {CHECKOUT_SESSION_ID} template variable in the success_url as in the above example.

When your customer clicks on your logo in a Checkout Session without completing a payment, Checkout redirects them back to your website by navigating to the cancel_url. Typically, this is the page on your website that the customer viewed prior to redirecting to Checkout.

Checkout Sessions expire 24 hours after creation by default.

Caution

Don’t rely on the redirect to the success_url alone for detecting payment initiation, as:

  • Malicious users could directly access the success_url without paying and gain access to your goods or services.
  • Customers may not always reach the success_url after a successful payment—they might close their browser tab before the redirect occurs.

Confirm the payment is successful

Note

When a buyer successfully confirms a subscription on Stripe with PayPal, they receive a receipt from Stripe as well as from PayPal.

When your customer completes a payment, they’re redirected to the URL that you specified as the success_url. This is typically a page on your website that informs your customer that their payment was successful.

Use the Dashboard, a custom webhook, or a third-party plugin to handle post-payment events like sending an order confirmation email to your customer, logging the sale in a database, or starting a shipping workflow.

Successful payments appear in the Dashboard’s list of payments. When you click a payment, it takes you to the payment detail page. The Checkout summary section contains billing information and the list of items purchased, which you can use to manually fulfill the order.

Checkout summary

Note

Stripe can help you keep up with incoming payments by sending you email notifications whenever a customer successfully completes one. Use the Dashboard to configure email notifications.

You can use plugins like Zapier to automate updating your purchase fulfillment systems with information from Stripe payments.

Some examples of automation supported by plugins include:

  • Updating spreadsheets used for order tracking in response to successful payments
  • Updating inventory management systems in response to successful payments
  • Triggering notifications to internal customer service teams using email or chat applications

Test the integration

Test your PayPal integration with your test API keys by viewing the redirect page. You can test the successful payment case by authenticating the payment on the redirect page. The PaymentIntent will transition from requires_action to succeeded.

To test the case where the user fails to authenticate, use your test API keys and view the redirect page. On the redirect page, click Fail test payment. The PaymentIntent will transition from requires_action to requires_payment_method.

See also

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