Paypal: Subscribe Buttons and Inventory

Question

Paypal lets you create purchase buttons, and one option is to make the purchase actually trigger an autopay - they call it a Subscription/Subscribe button. They also let you enter inventory for a given item.

If you enter 1 in Inventory for a Subscribe button, does Paypal:

A) Treat that as 1 item in stock, and after 1 month the subscription will run out

or

B) Treat that as 1 Subscription in stock, and after one person purchases it, it will be out of stock (but the Subscription that 1 customer purchased goes on indefinitely)

I assume B, but perhaps others have found otherwise.

Answer 1

I don't know the answer, and you can use your Paypal developer account to discover this by modifying the variable t3 Regular billing cycle units and setting it to to D days rather than M months. This is the units of the regular billing cycle (p3, above) Acceptable values are: D (days), W (weeks), M (months), Y (years)

Source: PayPal Subscriptions HTML Code

Answer 2

It is in fact (B) - the Inventory number refers to the number of Subscriptions in stock available for purchase, not the number of items received during any subscription. So if you make 1 available, and a customer comes and buys it, the inventory will drop to 0, and that one customer will then be billed automatically until either of you turns the subscription off.

This is actually useful for setting a single customer up with a specific subscription - the inventory helps ensure they can't accidentally buy it twice.