I was hoping to be pointed in the right direction before starting to dig in deep.
What is the current best practice to have peer to peer transaction trigger an event (cloud function). For example, in case of "AirBnb", a peer pays another peer an agreed upon amount and door lock automatically un-locks. Or better yet, as soon as door is unlocked a pre-set function transfers money from one peer to another based on agreed upon price/contract.
It appears like PayPal's Adaptive Payments would have worked, but it currently does not support new applications. Do any digital wallet providers (Venmo, CahApp, Apple Pay, Google Pay etc) have of such functionality? Square, Stripe etc all work great for merchant-peer but it seem to be tougher to find options for peer to peer. If that is still the case, what might be some ideas to consider?
Thank you very much.
AirBnB essentially uses PayPal Checkout to accept payments, and the PayPal Payouts API to send payouts to receivers later. There may be a little more to it, as they're a giant with a direct partner relationship with PayPal and potential access to bespoke thing--but that's the essential structure of what they do, and what anyone else could do.
You would need to contact PayPal to find out if Payouts is acceptable and will be approved by them for your own particular business use case. No one else can tell you this.
For facilitating direct payments from one peer to another, you can set the payee parameter in an ordinary PayPal checkout. This doesn't give you any gating control over the payment.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/integration-features/custom-payee/
Related
I am looking to implement an opencart solution for a client. They require a peer to peer payment system that allows a user to buy a product from multiple vendors. In other words the client will not hold any stock. They will just facilitate a transaction between the buyer and seller and collect a commission on each transaction. Has anyone here implemented such a solution in OpenCart?
i have paypal adaptive method, but i want credit card side also????
Thanks!
To process a card transaction (credit- or debit-card) there needs to be someone to hold the funds between the parties. It can be a e-wallet or a merchant with an account with an acquirer. The acquirer in turn talks to all the card schemas to make the transfer possible, often sorting out a few other things too, like fraud-screening.
As far as I know direct p2p between card accounts are not yet available, at least across different banks. So I think you still need a payment gateway to process it, and not to worry about the Payment Card Security (PCI) regulations.
I need to create a subscriptions system in my app, where users can subscribe to a certain package and they must be billed monthly.
Moreover, I need to charge their credit card automatically, and without requiring them to have a PayPal account.
I read about https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/erp_overview, but is seems it's not available anymore as I click on sign up and it gives me an error ("Sorry, this feature is not available at this time.").
Then I've read about PayPal Standard Payments, which have a subscription method (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/subscribe_buttons/)
From what I can read there is that this is what is suitable for my use case, and it says that I need to enable the above mentioned service, which it doesn't work.
Can someone point me in the right direction on what service should I use from PayPal in order to implement recurring payments (basically my users will subscribe themselves to a service on my website, and I need to charge them monthly).
Thank you.
If you're wanting to handle credit cards directly I would highly recommend going with Payments Pro w/ Recurring Payments APIs.
You'll have to pay a monthly fee to get it all activated, and it's a little bit more expensive than what you were looking at, but it will give you much greater flexibility building your application(s) into various experiences for your buyers.
I developed a Web Application that accepts payments via the ExpressCheckout API, for users to become a members.
Everything works fine.
I now want to extend my Web Application Services and offer my users with the possibility to buy items which are sold by third parties (my members).
The principle I would like to implement is quite simple: for each order, let the user pay for the item they choose and then transfer a part of the amount I received to the item provider, and keep some money for me. I would like to automate this process so that once I received the payment notification, I compute the amount of money to transfer to the item provider who might or not have a Paypal account (in other words, this means that I could maybe need to transfer the money to a bank account, using the IBAN/SWIFT data) and then proceed with the money transfer.
I tried to find a solution reading your documentation and came across the "chained payment" but the latter does not seem to be used within the ExpressCheckout workflow.
Also, since my implementation of the ExpressCheckout flow works, I would not like to have to find a totally different solution but rather extend it... if possible.
Could you please tell me which is the best solution for me?
In advance, many thanks for your help.
You could do 1 of 2 things. You could use Express Checkout with parallel payments. This means you could split the transaction up between different accounts at the time of purchase. The other option would be to just receive all of the funds into your account, and then when you are wanting to send money to the other accounts you could either use the Adaptive Payments (Pay) API or the MassPayments API to send money to the other accounts. Keep in mind you would have to send it to their PayPal accounts, you would not be able to send it directly to a bank account with either one of these API's.
I had the same issue and I got an answer from PayPal that it is not allowed to use Express Checkout to transfer money to your PayPal account and - at a later point in time - transfer the amount minus your service fee (which stays on your PayPal account) via Adapative Payments API to the seller's PayPal account. PayPal suggested to use Chained Payments API instead. All works fine in the sandbox, but once you need a Live APP ID from PayPal they will review your business case and deny it. At least that what happened to me.
I know that is old question, but anyway, I tried to find solution and was enable to perform the simillar thing like described in question. So, then I asked paypal about this, and they gave me advice to use SellerDetailsType Fields that 's called PayPalAccountID, description for this field is Unique identifier for the merchant. For parallel payments, this field is required and must contain the Payer Id or the email address of the merchant. It wasn't clear for me to use this field for solving my problem. Here is link https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/api/merchant/SetExpressCheckout_API_Operation_SOAP/ I described field for soap request, for NVP it's called PAYMENTREQUEST_n_SELLERPAYPALACCOUNTID, but the idea is the same. I hope it will help someone.
I need to be able to initiate transactions between two unknown parties via Paypal, say donor and recipient, without ever having to be exposed to the money itself - is this possible?
Basically, I want a donor to be able to click the donate button, fill in the amount and then be passed to Paypal to verify their details. My site will also supply the recipients account details to Paypal so the money goes directly to them rather than to my Paypal account. Essentially I want to enable transactions without having any legal or tax responsibilities for the money.
This needs to happen for an unlimited number of donors and recipients.
Can I do this? Paypal haven't been very helpful at all.
I am sorry to hear that you feel PayPal hasn't been helpful at all, but there are many resources at your disposal. It sounds like you have just not been asking the right person, or asking the right questions. Customer service for large corporations are difficult to traverse, but there are many people at PayPal who would have been easily able to answer your questions.
I always say this, though i'm not sure how many times on this forum: It is possible to do whatever you want with PayPal. Give me your idea, I will give you the way. Whatever you want to do can be done with the right coding.
You can use Website Payments Standard (WPS), and you would only need your merchant's email address to create buttons that go to their account. (set the business variable)
You can also use third party API calls for Website Payments Pro (WPP) and Express Checkout (EC) to process direct credit card transactions as well as PayPal payments via API for your merchants. (set the subject variable to the seller you're submitting the API on behalf of)
As for not having any legal or tax responsibilities for offering the service of payment connectivity (marketplace functionality) between sellers and merchants: IMHO you are dreaming. However, you will want to contact your local legal and tax representative to ask what liability you have. Though this should go without saying; this is StackOverflow, where you should ask questions regarding programming, not tax and legal advice.
Your tax and legal concerns are separate concerns, irrelevant to the technical question of whether it is possible to do what you want with PayPal or not.
I want to provide a question and answer service (I know there are thousands of such sites on the internet) to my users where someone can ask a question by specifying how much money they will give the person who provides a good answer.
When a good answer is provided, is it possible to take the money from the questioners paypal account and send it to the answering persons account automatically?
Basically, what I don't want to do is take payments from the questioner and hold it in my paypal account, then pay the answering person when his/her answer is accepted.
I will be using a LAMP configuration to make the service.
Neither the PayPal API nor the PayPal service in general provides for automatic person-to-person payments that are initiated by a third party. In other words, you must either be the payer or the payee in order to participate in a transaction; you cannot do it on behalf of another user.
Have you looked into PayPal Adaptive Payments API? From what I know it supports person-to-person money transfer. For more info visit
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_APIntro
Hope this helps.
You can use the PayPal Adaptive. Using this you can transfer money from one account to another account. Download the sample source code from GutHub https://github.com/paypal/adaptivepayments-sdk-php
I'd like to think wildly here (meaning not thoroughly so forgive me if there are mistakes). I think there are a few PayPal products you can consider. They do not perfectly fit, but here they are for your reference:
Auth / Order, Reference Transaction (aka RT), and Adaptive Payment (aka AP, but it doesn't fit your situation very much).
As I understand, your scenario would be like this:
The questioner posts a question, and agrees to pay a certain amount of money, say $5.
You don't want to hold the money. (hmm this is hard)
When a responder answers the question, and the question is selected as the best, the money is paid automatically from the questioner via PayPal.
With Auth / Order, it works like this:
The questioner "auth" you to take the $5. This money is NOT charged yet, but is still in the questioner's account. The amount can be honored too, just like you book a hotel. (Note you can honor the money for at most 29 days.)
When an answer is selected as the best and the responder is to be paid, you capture the money from the questioner. This way, they money is now in your account. (I know you don't like this...)
Then you pay the responder immediately. You can transfer money, you can use Mass Pay API, you can use PayPal Payouts API.
Well I know the best case would be that the money never appears in your account, not even a millisecond. But this is what I can think of, "immediately" is the closest to "not at all". Another problem with this way is, it's done in two steps, and in each step you or someone has to pay the fee. When you as the platform gets the money, you pay the fee, and then when you send it out, it depends on which product you use. But the good thing is, the money is never charged until it has to be charged. And it doesn't have to be charged if there is not a good answer at all.
With RT, it's similar to Auth / Order, it's an agreement between the questioner and you (the platform). The agreement lasts longer (2 years I think), but you still have to pay the responder, and you can't honor the money, meaning when you capture it, you may fail. Good thing is (or maybe this is the bad thing), you can charge the questioner many times with only one agreement.
With AP, it provides "Parallel" payment, meaning the questioner pays you AND the responder with only one payment, and you can share the payment with the responder, and you can decide who receives how much. You can also decide who pays the fee. But the problem is, the questioner has to be present to make the payment, so it's not done automatically without the questioner. (Express Checkout / EC does parallel payment too with some differences, also on the fee thing. So if you want to go AP way, you may also want to consider EC because it's a lot easier to integrate.)
I would go for Auth / Order. But maybe you can get in contact with PayPal merchant technical services and ask for more details.
https://ppmts.custhelp.com/
Or, here is the website of their documents:
https://developer.paypal.com/
Hope this helps.
Many posters have said that AP is a good choice. This is correct. You will need to request an application which provides an app ID once your app is approved by the vetting team. You apply here:
https://www.paypal-apps.com/
Provide as much detail as you can so that they don't have to come back to you with questions about your business, etc. Once it is approved, you can use the app ID provided and start development in a live environment.
If you want to get the API working while they review your app, you can use sandbox. https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/lifecycle/ug_sandbox/ I believe that the vetting team requires that you have a sandbox account / setup so that they can test your implementation once you are done.
Don't be fooled because you have ALL API permissions in sandbox. So if you forget to request a needed method like mass pay, you will not have that feature in live, even though it worked for you in Sandbox. If you need a feature, request it WHEN YOU APPLY. Otherwise, you will need to start a new app request. This isn't a big deal, but if time is of the essence, you will have to wait (usually 24 - 48 hours or so) for the app to be approved, barring any questions / requests that PayPal has for you.
Integration guide for AP:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/integration-guide/APIntro/
API operations and operations for Adaptive Payments:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/api/#ap