as the e-junkie admin, I would have the option of checking off a setting in the first page of editing the product (near the price field) that is essentially "allow trial period". Once I check that feature another field would enable itself for me to enter a trial period in days (7, 14, 30, 90, etc.) - free text. The trial days field is disabled if I don't check "allow trial period".
The experience for the product purchaser would look the same when they perform the purchase - "add to cart". However when they get to the shopping cart page, the "item" field would state - "[product name] - Trial", or "[product name] - x day trial".
For you as the e-junkie developer, Paypal has a "trial" feature where you can configure a period of time where the purchase isn't processed (optional: can specify lower amount to bill during trial). Once the trial period expires, the full amount is processed. This trial period would be the number of days entered above by the product administrator (7, 14, 30, 90, etc. days).
I'm not familiar with the Paypal API, but as a Paypal merchant, there is a trial feature only in the "subscribe" setup for the merchant interface in Paypal. Add to cart, Buy Now doesn't have trials.
So as e-junkie you would make a decision - do you handle the delayed trial period billing within e-junkies backend processing or do you kluge it and integrate with Paypal's subscription feature (assuming subscriptions are in the API) and leverage the trial period billing functionality there. The kluge would be to create a 1-period subscription (recurring 1 time) so that you could leverage the delayed billing in the subscription functionality.
Ideally e-junkie would handle the trial delay processing itself (not Paypal) for billing and provide a link in the customer's initial purchase email to cancel the trial if they weren't satisfied during the trial period.
The theory is that you would get more impulse buyers if they knew there was no risk in the purchase - they could cancel if they didn't like the product.
The issue for the seller is that now the customer has your electronic product for free and can cancel payment during the trial period. That is the tradeoff. However as the seller, I can mitigate that scenario by withholding product updates/upgrades for anyone who cancels, deterring buyers cheating the system (when trial is canceled, e-junkie removes them from the email/newsletter list).
