More than a question this is going to be a long story and a call for all those professionals, developers and merchants that are actively using paypal adaptive payments (preapprovals and chained).
I (and my team with me) strongly think that adaptive payments are and have been a great solution.
Since we adopted them in late 2012 we immediately understood the potential and the flexibility of this great set of APIs. The adoption of this APIs in Italy was something like a nightmare in those times. No docs in italian, no support in italian, everything was done in english with one great support person of paypal in Dublin following us in the integration at the phone :) We were pioneers in our country but at the end we finally had our flows done.
Preapprovals + chained payments and the world can be in your hand.
We could do almost anything and this was what we did. A great platform for buying groups that in those last year is expoloding in our country. Today we have dozens of active and happy users (thousands we brought to paypal) and almost one houndred very selected merchants that we've followed step by step with the paypal team in the limit removal nightmare stuff. One, by one.
And here comes the call.
How many are we using them and what will be the future and possible migration solutions?
As almost all of the users of adaptives knows those APIs are well functioning but deprecated since few years. This means that nobody can start new integrations with them but, worst of all, that all those that are actively using them - like us - still don't really know what the future will be. I'm fairly certain that we can't be alone. I'm almost sure that there are other businesses, merchants, developers who have built great ideas relying on those APIs and now that we've given soul and blood for years putting all of our efforts in developing, optimizing, updating and growing our platforms and our communities, we're at a crossroad: to wait and hope or to look for alternatives.
On an app owner view, there's no understandable reason why paypal should shut off those APIs and, infact, till today, fortunately we've heard nothing about a sunsetting of those APIs, however we all know that they have been deprecated and any of us can safely say that there won't be a sunsetting or a forced migration in the future.
So, why don't we start joining our voices to have clear, understandable and certified roadmap and / or plans around this topic?
Talking with the commercial team in Dublin, they say that everything is ok with adaptives and they will continue working for a long time (and this would be great) but, on the other side, talking with the MTS team the view is a little bit different and no so enthusiastic go on mood in the air. Most of all because of the introduction of the PSD2 Directive in Europe.
As many in the European market should have heard, in the last few months another big concern (investing everything in the payments industry) is the PSD2 compliance and maybe just for this directive that the future of adaptives could be involved too.
Adaptives unfortunately are not PSD2 ready and the hope that paypal will put efforts in making them compatible while it is a deprecated solution is very thin.
The strong customer authentication, mandatory in the new rules schema would force the tech team to update all their products but, always on the merchant / app owner / user view, it seems more plausible that paypal will put the more efforts in the new products instead of renewing the old ones.
However, adaptives are both:
a great solution used by a lot of merchants (again, how much we are?!) in the world continuatively draining new users and merchants (for free) to paypal (just for how the adaptives and preapprovals works, in many cases you're forced to open a paypal account and all we app owners have done this for years);
an easily adjustable tool to be PSD2 ready
We're now in a "grace period" for PSD2 and that to make Adaptive payments complying with PSD2 directive wouldn't be so hard: preapprovals are the CORE and if you add a strong customer authentication to the preapproval flow the great part of the job is done. Chained payments made direclty at the presence of the user too, just adding a strong customer authentication should fit the needs and server to server chained payments sould fall in the MIT (merchant initiated payments) that seems to be out of the object of the directive.
Forcing migrations, on the other hand, would result in loosing a lot of customers, merchants, app owners that for some reason can't change the architecture because of the specific business model or because they don't find real concrete solutions in alternative APIs. Fixing it appears to be a better solution.
The call to all the adaptive payments users is to join this conversation and bring your thoughts, just to see if we're alone or if we're a lot with the same issue at the door.
An enthusiastic and happy adaptive heavy user and owner in Italy.
Cheers, Fil
In planning for the future, the best approach would likely be to put together a list of your platform's requirements and expected volume, and contact PayPal regarding: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/commerce-platform/
You can also look at other options
I don't think anyone knows exactly how long Adaptive Payments will remain available as a legacy service for existing integrations, but I would expect it will be long enough for you to set up a new one that users can migrate to
Related
I am testing a feature of WhatsApp Business API using a test account. I want to integrate this functionality in my personal project. So far, I have tried submitting many different templates. But none of them were approved. Not just that, most of them were rejected with seconds by some AI I guess. They haven't provided any specific reason for it.
These are the templates I have submitted till now:
This template is for test purpose only!
(Transactional) Your package has been shipped. It will be delivered in 4 business days.
(Transactional)
Dear {{1}},
Your request to change your ABCD username has been approved. You can access your account using your new username.
Contact ABCD customer support for any further assistance.
(Transactional)
Dear Customer,
Welcome to ABCD Payment Gateway!
You’re now one among 50 lakh+ businesses that use ABCD to accept payments from their customers. Start your journey by visiting ABCD developer's documentation page.
We are eager to offer you support in integrating our payment gateway with your platform and to provide the best customer experience possible.
(Marketing)
Why Awareness campaign on waste management is so important?
Waste management and disposal of waste is a serious issue that we are facing nowadays. If we are not aware of proper waste management, it leads to serious issues like air pollution, water pollution, and soil pollution. By doing small practices in our daily life we can make a huge difference. For that, we all have to practice the “3Rs” in our daily life.
The 3Rs – Reuse, Reduce, Recycle
Reduce- try to reduce the use of single-use products maximum especially plastic substances.
Reuse- always try to reuse day to life things. For example, carry kit when you are going for shopping.
Recycle- try maximum to recycle or reuse things other than disposing of.
Above all 3R’s will help us and our society for the proper disposal of waste management.
(Marketing)
Hi there!
We are excited to invite you to join us for ABCD`s Biggest Education Fair to fulfil your dream to study MS.
Many program representatives from different universities and institutions will be present at the fair to provide you with the latest information on admission requirements and scholarships, as well as answer any questions you may have.
Date: February 25, 2023
Venue: XYZ
Please register by visiting our website.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Best Wishes,
ABCD
Does anyone know what is the problem with these templates?
We are building a Solana based application which will mint Semi-Fungible tokens (for Fungible Assets) let people trade them.
What we want next is to add metadata to this mint through which we are also going to set the creators and the seller fee basis points for royalty payments. We know how to do this and we have done it.
Anyway, the problem is the following: all the docs available on Metaplex we’ve seen are revolving around NFTs, Master Editions, Printing Editions, Auctions, etc. - which is not the case for us as we need to mint more than one token from the same mint.
The most important thing is to manage to benefit from the royalty fees each time shares are being traded on the secondary market. So we don't need auctions, vaults or other mechanisms like these.
Initially, we were thinking about Serum, but we don’t know whether
Serum also takes care of transferring the royalty fee to the
creators when the funds are settled.
After Serum, we’ve looked at the examples in the Metaplex
documentation about Metaplex Storefronts, but, as I said above, that
was really focusing on NFTs, Master Editions, Printing Editions,
Auctions, etc. - which don’t seem to fit our use case of Fungible
Asset. Maybe can this be customized for our Fungible Assets use case
somehow?
Would you be so kind to help us clear up a little bit what approach is the best for our use case and our needs?
Serum v4 (not released on mainnet yet) does support Metaplex royalties (see this commit). It should be released on mainnet in the coming weeks/month.
I am not aware of any other smart contract on Solana which supports this feature. However, you could probably create your own fork of an open source AMM and add a logic similar to the commit above.
Does anybody knows when this feature will be supported by REST API? I'm really like PayPal REST API, but this feature is very important to me and I believe to many other developers
Thanks
I can't officially speak for PayPal, since I have not worked for them in over a year (and wasn't an official spokesperson then either). However, since they almost certainly won't give you an official answer let me say what I can to help you:
Adaptive Payments (AP) is a product line, not a feature. AP is a bundle of features and behaviors, with an interface designed almost 10 years ago now (before the world converged on REST-style APIs).
PayPal's REST APIs, while named after an interface technology, are in fact also a product line, not a feature. A different product line from AP, with a different set of behaviors and features.
So AP being supported by PayPal's REST APIs is like saying "when will the Chevy Tahoe be supported by the Chevy Equinox"? Wrong question.
However there are two things that PayPal could actually do:
1) update AP with REST-adherent versions of the existing AP APIs. These would not be PayPal's REST API product, but the AP APIs reskinned. However, IMO the chances of this are near-zero for a variety of reasons. Don't hold your breath (or your development) hoping for this.
2) Improve the REST APIs by adding more features that AP currently has but the REST APIs do not. This is quite likely to happen, as part of the incremental improvement of the REST APIs, which PayPal wants to use as one of their primary going-forward integration paths (secondary in importance only to Braintree-based integration paths, if any).
If you can enumerate the specific features of AP that you want to see added to the REST APIs, let PayPal know. They likely won't promise dates for future feature deliveries (unless you are a strategic partner contracting with them to get those additions), but they are definitely actively working through a roadmap of REST improvements.
I have a website where people do simple cognitive psychology experiments. Currently, people volunteer. To increase numbers of responses, I would like to offer micropayments in a manner similar to Mechanical Turk*.
My question is, What would would be the best system to use to make these payments? I would guess that both paypal and flattr would be options. Has anyone with experience with setting up a micropayment system like this be able to offer advice?
cheers,
Mark
*I am not thinking about using mechanical turk itself, just because I do not think I would be able to control the web based studies exactly I would need.
Flattr would work in your scenario:
Each person doing the test would need a Flattr account.
They’d need to login with their Flattr account on your site (like on fundd.de) or connect your site with their Flattr (easy with OAuth).
Once they’ve taken the test you manually Flattr them and by controlling your monthly budget you control how much each click is worth.
Our API makes setting this up fairly easy and straightforward http://developers.flattr.net/
Downsides:
Required to sign up with an additional service.
Flattr currently caps monthly spending at €100 so if you have lots and lots of testers you’d run into problems of making the payment high enough. We are reconsidering this, at least for users in good standing.
Monetary incentives for testers bring in a different crowd and can influence the results of their tests but you probably already know that.
Cheers,
Teller
PS. I work at Flattr.
we are using Paypal Pro's Hosted solution for payments and finding that a lot of orders aren't completed when customers go to the payment page (one customer complained that they could only select Australia and United States for the shipping country!), we've found a lot of inconsistency with Paypal's service and 25% of orders aren't complete.
Worldpay seems like good alternative, does anyone have experience of both Worldpay and Paypal, is Worldpay more reliable?
Is Worldpay's documentation any good? Paypal's is terrible.
Are there any other alternatives?
We're trying to keep it simple by having the IMA and gateway all in one and process around £3k-£4k of payments a month.
Take a look at Avangate - www.avangate.com
This question is a few months old, but I'll answer it anyway.
PayPal's documentation is quite bad, but WorldPay isn't much better. In fact, they have documentation in place for somethings they don't yet support, and it can be difficult at times to figure out whether it's your code or that the service does not exist. This applies, in particular, to recurring payments.
We used to have PayPal, but we switched to WorldPay. My personal view is that PayPal is more flexible. WorldPay has its limitations - especially if you are selling SaaS and need some real flexibility, and as things get complicated for us, we have to get creative to work with it.
But at the end of the day, WorldPay support is a million times better than PayPal. For us, they are slightly cheaper (and will become cheaper this year hopefully as we have done some volume with them). Support responds to emails pretty regularly if not a 100%. Plus you can call. They're even happy to look at server logs and tell you why or how something got lost if it got lost.
To sum up and answer your question:
On Documentation - they are almost the same as PayPal.
On service, they are MUCH, MUCH better.
On price, they will eventually get better and hold money for only 48 hours before it hits your account (this is negotiable, btw).
Depending on what you want, there are other options available. If you want recurring payments and your IMA and PSP to come from one source, WorldPay is a good alternative, especially if you are based in the UK.
If IMA and PSP being the same is not important, I suggest checking out SagePay (UK) and Authorize.net (US) - IMHO they are both quite good. SagePay has its limitations, though, especially if you want recurring billing.
Please note, the above is based on my experience of selling customized, subscription based SaaS, not an online store.