I guess my question is not very specific, but still I am not sure about the answer.
I have a platform that allows individual sellers to sell digital goods.
I need to implement a payment flow, which will allow to split payment into 2 parts: commission for the platform and the rest for the seller.
Also I should not receive sellers money on my bank account, I can receive only my commission fee.
Is that possible to implement with adaptive payments chained flow? Or maybe any alternatives?
Yes, that's exactly what a chained payment is. Details available here.
Related
We're planning a web app that allows users to pay our clients directly through Paypal so there will be many different users and each will be paying a specific client through the website and there will be multiple clients.
These payments may be one-off payments but a few may be recurring.
We won't be charging a transaction fee for this so we basically want the whole payment amount to be deposited in the client's Paypal account (so they pay their own Paypal fees). I've looked at chained payments to be able to take a payment for a client but I'm just wondering what the actual flow of money is in a chained payment.
When a chained payment is made does Paypal deposit the payment go into our Paypal account first and then be paid into the client's account or does the client portion (in this case 100%) go directly into the client's account?
I'm asking as we're not sure how it would affect us in terms of accounting in our business if all the payment money was actually passing through our Paypal account (even if only briefly).
Or is a chained payment not the ideal solution for this?
Thanks,
Steve
If you are not taking a cut of the money, then I believe either Simple or Parallel payments would be a better solution. If you are going to be processing payments for a single buyer to a single merchant, then you can just use Simple Payments. If you are going to be processing payments for a single buyer to multiple merchants then you'd want to use Parallel Payments. More information on each of those APIs can be found here.
I understand that Paypal's MassPay can be used to, as a business, quickly make payments to multiple people. I also understand that the business sending the mass payment is responsible for the transaction fees, and that the recipients of the payments are not charged any further fees.
I am curious if it's possible to utilize MassPay to account for revenue shares / commissions when a buyer purchases a product through an eCommerce application.
For instance: my application allows users to buy and sell products. My business keeps 20% of every sale, and the seller receives the remaining 80%.
A seller sells a product for $100 to a buyer through my application. My business should receive $20, and the seller should receive $80. The buyer completes the checkout / purchase process by making a $100 payment through Paypal. My application has MassPay configured in a way that will send $20 of that $100 to my business's Paypal account, and the other $80 of that 100$ to the seller's Paypal account.
Is such a thing even possible?
if the answer is yes…
How will this appear in the Paypal accounts (activity / transaction history) of the buyer, the seller, and my business?
What if the buyer has a problem with the product they purchased, and they open a dispute with Paypal? Will they have to open a dispute for one transaction ($100), or two ($80 and $20)?
Because the buyer is the person making this mass payment, will they be charged additional fees in some way? Will those fees need to be factored into their purchase cost during the checkout process?
Thanks in advance.
You can absolutely use masspay to send "contingent" payments like rev shares and commissions; in fact this is the product's most common usage. It was built for that.
You may also be able to use PayPal products like chained or parallel payments to create multi-link payment flows.
In most cases you want payments to flow along with responsibilities/agreements. For example if I buy something (e.g. a t-shirt) I don't want to make multiple payments to supply chain members; I want to buy the shirt from someone and pay them, and it is their responsibility to take it from there; they may then owe a commission to someone (or to 10 different parties, I don't care), or they may owe a supplier (or a bunch of them)... not my problem.
So I strongly urge you to decide what model you want: is someone buying a product from you, and you will pay a supplier? is someone buying a product from a seller, and the seller will owe you a commission for providing the customer through your marketplace? Then set up your payment flows accordingly.
In the former case (ecommerce store) masspay is an excellent fit: the customer pays you and then you masspay (on a per-transaction or aggregated basis) payments to your suppliers. The buyer only sees the payment they are party to, which is their payment to you. Any dispute is between you and your buyer.
In the latter case (marketplace) the customer pays the full (total including commission) price to your sellers. Then you don't need to push a payment to your sellers but rather to collect a payment from them, so you would likely use invoicing or a billing agreement to collect your commissions.
A proposed scenario is, assume the shopping cart site, where buyer has to pay for a product. The sold product costs will be transferred to the respective merchant. Here, the website owner has to be paid(commission) for the purchased product.
Is it possible in Paypal? Right now, I am using Paypal checkout. Your ideas/suggestions would be helpful. Please do it.
There are a number of ways you could set this up.
You could use the Adaptive Payments platform, specifically the Pay API, to create parallel or chained payments so that multiple receivers can receive money within the same transaction.
You can also do a parallel payment with Express Checkout, but you can't do a chained payment.
The main difference is that with parallel payments the buyer will see the split during checkout. With a chained payment you can hide that so they only see the primary receiver. Also, chained payments can be delayed so you can trigger the commission to be paid at a later time if necessary (for example, waiting for services to be completed.)
Another way you could do this is to use Payments Standard, Express Checkout, or Payments Pro, and let the payment go entirely to a single account. Then setup a Pay API request to submit payment to the secondary receiver, or use the MassPay API. This could be setup within an IPN solution so the entire thing is automated. In this case you'd basically be building what the adaptive payments platform does for you, but it would give you a little bit more freedom over everything in the application.
I'm working on a software project in a group of developers and we plan to sell the product via an electronic payment system such as PayPal. In this connection, we wonder if it would be possible to set up a business account with PayPal (or any other payment system) in a way that makes any received payment split according to a certain ratio and the shares automatically transferred to other accounts?
If it's possible with PayPal, how we do it or where do we find any help docs on this subject?
If you are wanting to split payments, you can use PayPal's Express Checkout or Adaptive Payments to split up the funds into different accounts. Using Express Checkout with parallel payments, you can split up the transaction up and the receivers of the payment will pay the fees according to the amount they received. The buyer will see the different receivers that were involved in the transaction. If you use Adaptive Payments you can set who pays the fees, and it can be set up so the buyer does not see the other parties involved.
I'm struggling to understand PayPals documentation, but is Parallel Payments intended to pay multiple merchants from a single buyer?
A previous question asks for the difference between Parallel and Chained payments, but no mention of this fact is in the answer.
What I need to do is pay money into multiple PayPal accounts which may not be merchant accounts. In this case is Chained Payments my only option?
Any advice here would be much appreciated.
Yes. PayPal Adaptive Parallel Payments sends money from one buyer to multiple merchants.
PayPal Adaptive Chained Payments sends monety from one buyer, to 1 merchant (who can take his cut and will be the merchant of record) and the remainder is automatically forwarded to the second recipient.
Also take a look at Introducing Adaptive Payments
Parallel payments
Chained payments
In addition to a slightly different flow, chained payments also allows you to designate another recipient as the one to pay the fees.
For example, if receiver 1 is going to be merchant of record, but you want receiver 2 to pay all the fees, you could set that up with Adaptive Payments as well.