On the live site, a billing cycle repeats after the actual specified time elapses; for example, a one month billing cycle takes one month to occur. You can simulate the elapsed time for a billing cycle in the Sandbox when testing a recurring payments profile, in which case the actual elapsed time is reduced. This is useful when you want to simulate a billing cycle without waiting for the actual time to elapse.
To reduce the actual elapsed time, you specify Day as the period. When you specify
Day, the billing cycle occurs every
n minutes in the Sandbox, where
n represents the frequency; for example, if you specify
1 for the billing frequency and
Day for the period when executing the
CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile API, the billing cycle occurs every minute when testing in the Sandbox.
Consider a scenario in which you want to simulate a one-month billing cycle after a three-month trial, without waiting four months. In the Sandbox, you could specify the following NVP parameters:
In the Sandbox, the trial billing period would take approximately 3 minutes and the regular billing cycle would occur approximately every minute. When you are ready to go live, you would change the trial billing period and the billing period to
Month.
