Yes Paypal has a subscription option that allows you to charge reocurringly. (made up word)

I vote for PayPal; as within my 15yrs of experience, I've only found 'two' other processing systems to be 'just as' or 'more' flexible.

Authorize.net; which is a more expensive solution due to only being a gateway for a merchant account.

e-gold.com; which only does transactions via digital gold.

PayPal is the more cost effective of the three and allows a variety of methods in which to collect payments...
- fellow PayPal Member account balance
- credit cards (all majors - visa, mastercard, diners club, amex...)
- echecks

AND, after 60days of owning an account in good standing, you can get a PayPal MasterCard debit card; which allows you to have instant access to the money in your PayPal account WITH a 5% rebate on all outgoing transactions on the card.

There's no other system; (to date); that allows this type of instant money access with those types of benefits. AlertPay is "going to" offer a debit card; but their card will carry some pretty heavy fees.

Hope this helps...
PLP,
tecHead

Paypal... although the only disadvantage is that people are able to cancel anytime by just logging into their account. So it's difficult to keep track whos been paying and whos membership should be canceled

For all my sites, I accept PayPal and Visa/Mastercard through my Authorize.net gateway. Obviously, PayPal is convenient, but I do think it adds a degree of credibility when you're accepting payments directly from your own website.

Romell

Paypal for me as well. And since I'm using Fantasos, it automates practically all steps of the process for me, including sending login details, signing the customer up for my mailing list and automatically revoking the customer's access the instant they cancel their Paypal subscription.

~ Sirius

We use a combination of PayPal and PayFlow Pro (formerly owned by Verisign, but now owned by PayPal as well).

The former is very convenient, but as has been mentioned elsewhere unless you dedicate a PayPal account to the membership site it is very hard to port the subscriptions if you should sell the site (all the credit card and other payment details are hidden inside PayPal).

The latter allows portability as you collect and store the credit card and payment details yourself (meaning you MUST take care of the security), but like other gateways requires you to have a merchant account.

So like most options each choice has pros and cons.

Someone else mentioned that PayPal was a problem because people can unsubscribe within PayPal and it's hard to track who is still a member. PayPal supports a system they call IPN, which means PayPal notify you of certain events, such as cancellations. If your membership engine supports this then tracking them becomes automatic - we use aMember which does have this support, and integrates to aWeber for newsletters.

Cheers.

As someone who sold a business that had Paypal subscriptions...

Even if your Paypal account is on the domain you are selling, you will NOT be able to transfer these subscriptions to a new Paypal account.

So if, like me, you want to keep your Paypal account but transfer the subscriptions...you are screwed.

It only works if you want to sell the Paypal account with the business.

The subscriptions are linked to a Paypal account ID, NOT an email address! So even if I delete the company's email address from my account, and you add the same email address to your account, the subscriptions will not work!

Do not use Paypal subscriptions unless you intend to sell your Paypal account in its entirety with your business.

Had I known this, I would never have accepted Paypal subscriptions for my business.

-Erica