I'm a software developer working on a homeschool registration website. I have a use case I'm not sure PayPal Invoicing can handle.
The scenario: I have Families and Teachers. Families select a number of classes and checkout. At time of checkout, I want to generate (what I think of as) an invoice to the Family. I want the invoice to request the family to pay the teacher(s) for the selected classes. I do not want to collect payments myself and redistribute payment to teachers - this raises too many issues about contractors/employees. Payments need to take place peer to peer, Family to Teacher(s).
When payments have been made, I would like a notification for each item on the invoice (a teacher being paid) at which point, I can lock in the enrollment of that family in the class, as it has been paid.
So, is this something PayPal Invoicing can do? I want to emphasize that I want the family to receive a single request to pay multiple teachers, not multiple requests to pay a single teacher. And, all families and teachers are assumed to have PayPal accounts.
Also, I saw that pricing is 2.9% + $0.30. Does the recipient of the invoice (the family) pay this, or does the organization issuing the invoice (the homeschool) pay this? The homeschool is a non profit. Can this be done without fees?
Thanks!
The transaction mode on your platform is a peer-to-peer / marketplace payment flow, so you may want to implement PayPal Adaptive Payments instead of Invoicing service.
As the platform/APP owner (API caller), you would easily manage the transactions with these implementations:
Adaptive - Parallel payments to fullfill the payment request (one to many) from family to teachers
IPN (Instant Payment Notification) to handle the transaction call-backs, your back-office program will be able to lock in the enrollment of that family in the class, based on the payment call-backs.
Adaptive Payments will support flexible fees payer, so that you would be able to set either the family or the teachers to bear the cost
See the overview & technical instructions at the PayPal Developer Site as an intro, and obtain the SDK per your programming language at HERE
The Invoicing API isn't what you want.
What I would recommend is an Express Checkout integration setup with Parallel Payments. You won't have to mess with Permissions if you do it that way, and the individual amounts can go directly to each teacher (receiver) on the transaction.
If you happen to be working with PHP this PayPal PHP SDK will make the Express Checkout Calls very simple for you.
Related
Definition of the proper PayPal-method on our marketplace.
It is a dental marketplace where customers can buy several products from multiple sellers (merchants) at the same time. What we need to do is a Payment that only show the different sellers on the PayPal Payment interface (incl. tax, shipping etc. on each seller/merchant) when the customer submit the order. It is important that Dentlet (our marketplace) does not figure on the customer Payment page (due to legal considerations).
Furthermore we only need to Autorize the payment during customer checkout. This is important as we don’t want the customer to transfer the payment to seller/merchant before the actual item is shipped/invoiced (or part of the items are shipped/invoiced).Capture should be on Invoice generated by our marketplace based on shipment. Instantly when/after the Payment has been captured, then we need to do a commission from the seller/merchant PayPal account to Dentlet PayPal account.
Earlier on we have been suggested to go with Express Checkout in this scenario, but due to some challenges implementing we have now been advised to go with: pre-approval with adaptive chained payment. Somehow it seems like we need some functionality from both Parallel and Adaptive - we dont know how to make this happen.
All architectural advises will be appreciated and a freelance consultancy job is available as well.
Best Regards,
Mikael
I know about PayPal Chained Payments. They involve a primary (the goods seller) and secondary (the store) receipt and the primary one have full control over refunds and so on.
I want to have a way to process credit cards, without the buyer to have an PayPal account. I wonder if there is some mechanism to have a primary and secondary receipt in this case. How to handle fee receiving in this case?
I was stuck with the same sort of issue.
My research concluded that this cannot be done, with the current adaptive payments APIs.
So there are two solutions
1) Wait till the rest api team adds spilt payments to the rest APIs. You can follow development of this feature # https://github.com/paypal/PayPal-iOS-SDK/issues/9
2) Pay into one account (A nominee account look it up) and use mass payments to pay out to other accounts
I have an educational website that uses 'Stripe Connect' to accept payments from students, and split the payments between myself (the platform provider) and the teachers (content-creators).
Payments to teachers are currently handled through Stripe. Whenever a student purchases content, the teacher automatically receives the payment directly into their Stripe account. I retain a portion of the transaction directly into my Stripe account. It's an easy system and works nicely.
The problem is that students want to pay with PayPal.
So, I would like to add PayPal as a payment option for students, without forcing content-creators to connect two separate accounts--one for when viewers pay with PayPal, and another for when viewers pay with Stripe. The only idea I have so far, is to deposit all PayPal payments to one PayPal account, then manually "payout" teachers into their Stripe accounts every week.
But is there an automated way to do this? Stripe says they don't accept payments from PayPal.
Any ideas/help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Adaptive payments does support chained payments, as Andrew says in his answer; it would work very much like what you describe having set up with Stripe.
However, this will not meet your requirements of having both PayPal and Stripe payments arrive in a single teacher account. Unfortunately, Stripe & PayPal see each other as competitors and to my knowledge neither one has built a tidy product to consolidate "their" payments into the other company's account.
If you are willing to move away from Stripe, PayPal does provide many solutions that consolidate "raw" credit card payments and PayPal account payments into a single receiver account, including through Adaptive Payments as cited by Andrew.
I would add that Braintree, having been purchased by PayPal, provides perhaps the most Stripe-like integration for a product that would accomplish this goal. However, I do not believe that the Braintree SDK will do the chained payments for you; you might have to do some work to make that happen on your end (take the first payment, then calculate and make payouts either weekly as you mentioned or per-incoming-transaction).
A couple other things to think about: if you split some payments into delayed fulfillment but others are chained inside one payments provider you will need to support two very different flows; you may find it easier (for both you and your content providers) to select one model and run everything through that model.
Also, instead of payments going to you & then chained to the content providers you could have payments to go directly to the content providers and then trigger billing (either invoicing or automatically collected via recurring payments) from the content providers to you for your cut.
The best pattern depends largely upon how you want the legal & financial responsibilities to lie: are you providing the good or service and people are paying you for it, making you like a retail store or distributor for producers? Or are content providers providing the good or service being paid for to the students, and you are like a marketplace/facilitator/advertising venue? This question becomes significant as soon as someone is unsatisfied with something they have bought :).
You can use the Adaptive Payments platform with PayPal to split payments just like you're doing with Stripe. Specifically, you'd use the Pay API setup as a chained payment with a secondary receiver.
If you happen to be working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make all of the API calls very simple for you.
I have a hard time finding clear answers to what's involved in implementing following case of chained payments using PayPal...
We are based in New Zealand, offering following types of accounts:
https://www.paypal.com/nz/webapps/mpp/compare-business-products
Currently, we have a Business Express Checkout account.
Our browser app allows users to set up product configurators. The configurators are then used by other users (consumers), to purchase configured products.
A. Simple payment case:
When consumers pay for the configured product, we are the primary recipient, and pass on the payment to the owner of the configurator, minus our revenue share %.
B. Complex Payment case:
Same as A, but multiple secondary recipients. We can't use parallel payments, because the multiple recipients need to be obfuscated.
For each case:
If not chained payments, what is the best fit PayPal option? Which API, if applicable?
Does the Express Checkout account support the required API? If not, which account type, available in New Zealand, does?
Which of the parties requires approval from PayPal? What type of approval? How long does the approval process take, and what affects its success?
Any other considerations when moving from the sandbox to the live setup?
What's the cost of the solution?
We'd obviously favour solutions that require minimal approval hassle, as we will be dealing with many configurators.
It seems like Adaptive Chained Payment is your best option.
Express Checkout support parallel payment but Express Checkout does not support chained payment.
You need a apply for an APP id if you're using Adaptive Payment. I could not answer how long it will took for them to approve.
Everything is the same when you're moving in Live. Just make sure your App has been approved, and the endpoint is change to Live.
The only cost is the PayPal fee's that PayPal collect for each transaction you made.
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.