express checkout for recurring payments does not work for german payers

Question

I am currently developping a PayPal payment transaction with ExpressCheckout and RecurringPayments. Testing the software I get the following message after the ( german ) buyer logged in at paypal for confirming the payment:

"Zurzeit können wir Ihre Anfrage leider nicht verarbeiten. Kehren Sie zu facilitator account's Test Store zurück und wählen sie eine andere Option aus."

wich means

"We cannot procceed the request. Please got back to the store an chose another option".

A little bit googling shoes me this answer of the paypal support:

Dear xxx,

Thank you for contacting PayPal Merchant Technical Services.

As much as i want to give you a positive answer, but unfortunately the Express Checkout Recurring payment API is currently not supported for German buyers. These German buyers will always get the error you saw because the German funding sources are not supported for the recurring payment API and therefore this error is thrown. I am really sorry , but the German buyers won't be able to use this Service. The only way around that would be a change in your integration and process recurring payments for Germany with either the preapproved payments or reference transaction API:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECReferenceTxns

https://www.x.com/devzone/articles/recurring-payments-reference-transactions-and-preapproved-payments

This statement ist two years old. So me question: Is this still fact? I can not belive this, because I would suppose that PayPal would mention this important information in the API reference, so programmers could handle this problem before they implement this method.

Is there a way to solve the problem without programming a new transaction method?

Thanks

Answer 1

Just as an update on the situation:

We tried to implement Recurring Payments via PayPal for German customers (the business itself was also based in Germany) and ran into the same problems the OP described above. The PayPal support told us (on the phone) that RP is still not available in Germany, with no date when this might change.

The reason some (US-based) companies like Twitch do in fact support subscribing to channels by German users (even without credit cards) is because they have a transaction volume of more than $5,000 per month. To get your PP business account enabled for RP with German customers, you have to apply at PayPal and be a large enough company.

The reason being that PayPal basically grants the company access to the buyer accounts, so in theory they can deduct money as they like (if you look closely at the Express Checkout RP API, you can see that the amount with which you actually create the recurring payment profile is NOT the one that the user agrees on when logging into PayPal).

So in conclusion: As of December 2014, Recurring Payments are not supported for German buyers and there is no public ETA when this might change.