Recurring Payments with Digital Goods for Express Checkout is the verbose name PayPal chose for their most convenient subscription service.

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes in the PayPal documentation, you will know it’s easier to manually decrypt a 1024 bit RSA private key than to understand the PayPal Digital Goods with Express Checkout API.

After I put in the human computing cycles to decrypt the documentation & API, I funnelled the knowledge into an easy-to-use PHP library. I am now in the process of publishing human friendly documentation on how to use this library (and the Digital Goods product) on this site.

It’s a work in progress, but you can already checkout a few tutorials on this site and the PayPal Digital Goods PHP Library on GitHub.

Digital Goods Basics

If you are not familiar with PayPal’s Digital Goods product, have a quick read of the introduction page. As the name suggests, it’s a payment solution for non-physical goods.

The Digital Goods killer feature is in-context payments. This new process prevents purchasers venturing too far from your website to make the payment, which promises to lower checkout abandonment rates.

Assumed Knowledge

This site assumes a knowledge of the PayPal Digital Goods for Express Checkout product and its incontext payment process. A working knowledge of PHP and object oriented PHP development is also required to understand how to use the library.