We occasionally hear from merchants who would like to set up a product that their customers can buy, but they don’t want that product to recur. Instead, they want the product to generate one charge to their customer, and that’s all.
Please note that this is different than executing an instant credit card charge, which is covered in another document. This page is about defining a Product, but one that only causes a single charge when your customer subscribes to it, then it quits.
We do not have a non-recurring product type. However, many merchants have set up recurring products to act as non-recurring products.
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Define a new product.
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Define a one-time upfront charge that is the amount you want to collect once for this product by setting a recurring price of $0 that is billed every 1 day(s).
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Define the expiration of this product as 1 day.
When your customer subscribes to this product (or if you subscribe them to this product), they will be charged the Up-Front Fee, and then the product will go into recurring mode… but that will end 1 day later. And there will be no charge for the 1 day of recurring time that passed.
We realize this is not perfect, as it may be confusing to your customers to get a receipt with the above details on it, but as we mentioned above, it seems to work reasonably well for a number of merchants who need to occasionally sell a product that only charges their customer once.