PayPal Integration

How the integration works

Churn Buster is a revenue recovery layer for subscription businesses. For most billing platforms it watches your account for failed payments on its own. PayPal doesn't expose that kind of event feed, so you tell Churn Buster about each subscription payment as it happens through our API. When a payment fails, Churn Buster opens a recovery campaign for that customer and sends a timed sequence of emails. When a payment succeeds, the campaign closes on its own.

Recovery happens inside PayPal, not on a capture page

With card-based recovery, the customer updates their card on a Churn Buster capture page and Churn Buster retries the charge. PayPal owns the payment method, so there's no card for us to collect or retry. Instead, the recovery email walks the customer through fixing the payment inside their PayPal account, with step-by-step instructions rather than an update button. Everything else works the way it does on any other integration — the timing, the sequence, and the branding are all the same.

Get set up

Contact us and we'll create your Churn Buster account. For the best experience, schedule a kickoff call and we'll make sure you get off to a great start. Or email support@churnbuster.io.

Send us your PayPal payment events

Once your account is ready, connect PayPal by notifying Churn Buster of subscription payment events in real time through the Churn Buster API. Use paypal as the source name, and use PayPal IDs for customers, subscriptions, and payments.

There are three events to send.

• For failed payments, subscribe to recurring_payment_failed and call the failed payments endpoint when one is received.
• For successful payments, subscribe to recurring_payment and call the successful payments endpoint.
• For cancellations, subscribe to recurring_payment_suspended and recurring_payment_skipped, and call the cancellations endpoint.

Here are your test mode API keys, and here is a test-mode API debugger you can use to inspect the API requests you send our way.

Go live

Let the Churn Buster team know once you've completed the integration. We'll adjust your Capture links for PayPal, switch you to live mode API keys, and go live.

Questions?

Email support@churnbuster.io and we'll look at your setup with you.