TOPIC: Recurring donations - what's the mechanism, exactly?

Can you provide a little more info about how exactly the recurring transaction function works? Does DT Donate store the user's credit card information? Does the module initiate the transaction automatically itself, or does it send an e-mail to the user asking them to approve...?

Thanks!
Shayna

No, the info is not stored and re-processed by DT Donate. For either Authorize.net or PayPal, a subscription is created to the payment gateway processing the recurring transactions. For Authorize.net, you must have ARB (automatic recurring billing) enabled on your account, which is an additional monthly cost for your merchant account... about $10/mo I believe.

May I tack onto this discussion? Our DT Donate component is processing one-time donations properly; however, we have had a problem with it processing the recurring donations option properly through PayPal. We did have the DT Donate configuration set for both one-time AND recurring donations when this problem occurred. We set it back to be only one-timedonations when we ran into the glitch, pending a resolution.

For example, on 8/04/2011, a donor on our site who does have a PayPal account usedDT Donate to set up a recurring donation to begin on 8/06/2011 and to expire in 2months; however, despite the time period options selected by the on the PayPal side, the donation started on the day it was placed (which was 8/04/2011) and set it up to keep going indefinitely.

The PayPal support contact person who looked into this and reversed the incorrect time frame for that person's donation, could only offer the suggestion that somehow DT Donate is not sending all parameters over to PayPal. Should the communication between DTDonate and PayPal require any special option selections on the PayPal side to make the recurring donations option function work properly?

Even though we did no and do not have have any credit card options checked on the DTDonate configuration screen, PayPal is processing the one-time donations sent via DTDonate. Since the one-time donations are processing, do we still need to select credit card options on our config panel and could this be related to the recurring donation glitch?

We have not opened an Authorize.net account and have planned for now to have one-time and recurring donations work through PayPal. Thanks for any guidance you may be able to provide.