How do applications like AirBnB handle transactions in terms of taking a commission and paying out a host?
What platform i.e. PayPal would allow for making EFTs to different bank accounts automatically via an API call?
Is this even possible or are these kinds of transactions handled in a more manual way? I would really like some input on this matter.
The most common solution, which I think AirBnB might actually use some flavor of, is to send payments to a PayPal email address using Payouts -- and then the recipient gets the money in their PayPal balance and can use or withdraw it to their bank however they want.
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I am setting up a monthly automated backend process that will transfer money from a central account to thousands of PayPal accounts. The transactions will vary anywhere from $50 to $10,000. The key requirements here are:
Receiver must pay the fees
No user input required. By this, I mean this process should run without any kind of action on my end (I've noticed that some PayPal integrations require a redirect, approval on the sender side, etc.).
Here are the possible ways I see that you can send money using PayPal:
Mass Pay
Uses classic SOAP APIs. Sender must pay fee, so not an option
Payouts API
Uses new REST APIs. Sender must pay fee, so not an option
AdaptivePayments
Uses classic SOAP API. However, you can force the receiver to pay the fees.
Rest API Payments
See https://developer.paypal.com/docs/rest/api/payments/#payment
Uses REST API, which is good.
Can you force the receiver to pay the fee?
Can this be used without a web browser?
So, it seems like AdaptivePayments or REST API Payments are the only options that could work (there could be more, though). I'd obviously prefer to use the more modern REST API, especially for a new project, but if the functionality that I want to achieve is not possible, then I supposed I will have to use the classic Adaptive Payments option. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
The only option that allows you to force the receiver to pay the fee is Adaptive Chained Payments, but that would not work for your situation. The type of payment you would be sending would be an Implicit Simple payment, which only allows the sender to pay the fee.
So, your best option would be to use the MassPay API, primarily because of the fee. For US payments, the fee is 2%, capped at $1 which is a significant saving over sending a regular payment at 2.9% + $0.30.
If the fee is that important, you could program it to reduce the amount you send by 2% or $1, whichever is higher.
Title probably isn't really light shedding, let me rephrase.
On a platform that i have developed in asp.net, A customer can buy a product from an online seller, both of which are from my DataBase, registered users. Now when the customer makes a transaction, i wish to take a 5% cut from the total transaction amount, and the rest is sent to the online seller. I'm not asking for code to do this, but how is this done the correct way theoretically speaking?
Should the payment go to me first, than i split it into 2 payments 5% for me 95% for the seller, or maybe is there some built-in Paypal feature that enables this?
The Express Checkout API's will give you more freedom to integrate into your application a little more tightly, and the experience for buyers is a little nicer. It allows you to setup a parallel payment where you have multiple receivers on the transaction (with whatever amounts going to each that you specify) but the buyer will be able to see the split during the checkout.
If you want to hide the split you could go with the Adaptive Payments API instead. Within that, you can do parallel or chained payments, or even a delayed chained payment. Chained payments will hide the split from the buyer during checkout, and a delayed chained will be only give the money to the primary receiver until you specify that the secondary payment(s) should be sent by calling the ExecutePayment API.
Yet another option would be to use Payments Standard or Express Checkout to have the money sent to a single account, and then you could forward any payments necessary using the Pay API just for a single payment. This can be automated from within an IPN solution.
I realize that's a pretty broad answer, but it really was a pretty broad question.
I'm going to offer my customers a selection of subscriptions to digital content. I want the customer to be able to add or delete subscriptions later, with as little hassle as possible.
It seems that if I use Paypal vault, I can collect the card information on the same subscriptions screen without multiple redirects and later change the monthly total without another checkout process or even customer sending approval to Paypal!
Does Paypal allow this? It seems too easy and also too permissive. Also, do I need to worry about PCI compliance?
Does anyone know a better way to do this (with or without Paypal)? I don't know how to use paypal recurring payments without a lengthy checkout if they ever change their subscriptions. Google wallet does not have subscription cancellation in their API! Several other alternatives only allow preset subscription amounts.
The CSC/CVV is missing from the examples here: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/store-a-credit-card/ which makes me think you cannot use the card at will. The customer is probably going to be asked for authorisation.
Normally your online payment provider needs to support recurring payments (installments, subscriptions). PayPal does, there's a specific API:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/installment_buttons/
For the customer it's one-off, then the card is billed, say, monthly.
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.