I would like to know if paypal offers something to solve the following problem:
User pays for virtual currency for the first time (user interaction)
When user is about to consume all of the virtual currency, take money again from the user paypal account (no user interaction)
I've been looking through Paypal documentation and found recurring payments, but they are done every X time, not when a condition is met.
Cheers.
After some investigation I found that several payment providers offer a service called Vault where you can store credit card information and get an identifier back to use for future transactions.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/rest-vault-overview/
https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges#saving-credit-card-details-for-later
Related
We want to offer payments using paypal within our web-app concept. A few days ago i took my first ride using uber in Germany. They provide to add paypal as payment method and after every ride i just can pay using paypal without entering my credentials again.
How to implement a payment process like this?
We want our users to add paypal as payment method and then - X days aftersignup (eg. when we found the right product for him) we want to start the subscription.
The thing is that these X days varies from user to user so we cant use a billing agreement with a fixed start date and due to the fact its a subscription model we cant use just a single payment authorization.
I found the solution: Paypal calls this feature "Adaptive Payments". You can read it here: Adaptive Payments API Reference
I have a merchant site.
I wonder if the following scenario is possible :
A customer subscribes a "full shop access" and I can withdraw money from it's paypal account when he purcahses something. He does not have to login to paypal or anything at anytime but the moment he chose "full shop access".
Given that money amount will be differents.
I found a lot of thing about recurrent payment but it's on given periods and given amounts therefore it's not at all what I need.
I just want the customer to say paypal once : "OK, I trust this website, it can get my money anytime he needs to".
So if it's possible, can anyone give me a link to documention about this ?
Regards
1) Create a token using SetExpressCheckout with the L_BILLINGTYPE0 set to MerchantInitiatedBilling
2) Create a billing agreement using CreateBillingAgreement and pass TOKEN for the response after redirecting the user to PayPal.
3) Charge their billing agreement id using DoReferenceTransaction.
This method requires you to get approval from PayPal to use Reference Transactions.
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 am trying to setup a chained payment app, and got the application approved. I was hoping that like in parallel payments, chained payments can have users with or without a registered paypal account. But with email accounts that are not registered, the api returns an error code 520009 saying the account 'email#domain.com' is restricted. I did see the following link having the same issue.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/10262241/903978
Though in their dev doc says anyone with an email can get paid/ notified (except the app owner who needs a verified account), It is throwing an error. I have posted a ticket to paypal/mts but have nt heard from them yet.
My app case is,
1. User gets paid eg $100. They are the primary recipient in chain.
2. application (secondary reciever) gets a cut of this payment. say $2.
Any one know if chained payments need primary as well as rest of the recipients to have valid paypal accounts and not just an email? Or is there something in the call that allows primary recipients with just an email address?
( I know that application owner needs a registered paypal account).
Thanks
Paypal/mts confirms that their documentation is incorrect. Chained payments require confirmed paypal accounts and not just an email ID. They said they will update the documentation.
I can confirm this also, Paypal Adaptive Payments with Chained Delayed payments does require the secondary receiver and the primary one to be verified, but there seems to be some confusion about 'confirmed' and 'verified'. When pressing PayPal on this we discovered the criteria differs (or so they told us at Eco Market) and that users sometimes have to have confirmed their email address (simply clicking the verification email they get sent), but sometimes also have to go a step further and verify their account (going through the other steps like bank account confirm). They told us is varies based on country sometimes but for security reasons didn't tell us much more on how they do this (not overly helpful).
What we do to handle this is catch the error and as a marketplace we automatically contact the customer/seller to inform them the order cannot be processed due to the sellers account not being verified.
Going a step further, you could also validate sellers (again in a marketplace model) accounts by using the exact same API to take a small payment from them (which could be refunded using the API), which would allow you to validate sellers to make sure that they had a verified account before signing up.
Hope it helps if anyone else has any experiences of this and how they handle it I'd love to hear.
Jason Dainter
Eco Market
In my experience, in adaptive payments, (in particular chained payments) you need this environment:
a) the app holder/developer must have a registered and verified paypal business account (the premium account is ok too but not the personal)
b) the recipients must have a business account
if the amount doesn't exceed the limits it is ok if it is not verified too but if the amount exceeds the limit you'll have a problem in the chain.
c) the sender must have a paypal account, a simple personal account will fit.
Sometimes (rarely) happens that one payment fails due to restrictions on the sender email. The most frequent case I saw this happens was when the sender made a preapproval with one e-mail and then, before the preapproval was payed, he/she changed the e-mail in his/her paypal account. Silly but paypal has no control on this environment.
Hope this is helpful for you.
Cheers, Fil.
Genoa, Italy
I wanted to use Paypal's IPN service to verify payments for a recurring subscription charge for my website. How do you tie the IPN confirmations to a user in your site?
The IPN confirmation message has a name, email, paypal ID, recurring payment ID, but it seems to not give a unique identifier since I don't know where the paypal ID or recurring payment id comes from and it may not be trivial to uniquely match up the name/email that a user has on their paypal account (or entered there) with the name/email I have for them on my site (there may be many John Smith's and the person may choose to use a different email.)
1) When I send the initial payment request to Paypal, I can attach a unique UUID in the URL I ask them to send back to me, so if I save that unique ID for that user I can match that payment confirmation to the user who initiated it. Am I making that harder than it is? Is there an easier way?
2) Also, for a recurring/subscription charge, does paypal always use the URL I specified with the initial payment initiation? Does anyone have practical experience using the recurring Paypal payments with IPN's, does it reuse that unique URL? Or do I have to associate the Paypal ID's with the user after the first recurring payment is received?
Attaching unique data to the payment request is pretty much the accepted way to do it.
I don't have any experience with recurring charges.
I recently also set up some reoccurring payments with Paypal.
I actually wanted people to register as members after paying for the subscription, if they wanted to. As having to sign up as a member could add some friction to the sale process. So I don't send any user info along with the Subscribe button.
What my IPN script does is generate a unique activation code tied to the Paypal subscriptionID in the Activations table, then it sends this code to whoever paid for the subscription, with instructions on how to activate.
At the point of activation, you need to register or login. At this point the userID is added to the relevant row in the Activations table.
When the EndOfTerm IPN notification comes in the IPN script looks up the userID from the Activations table based on the SubscriberID given in the IPN. Then I can do whatever I need to do to that user to disable their subscription.
At all time the URL of the IPN script remains the same.
1) You can send an 'item_number' parameter with the initial subscription setup, which will get passed back to you. I'd suggest embedding an identification token in it.
2) If you mean the 'return' parameter, no, that's for sending the user to at the conclusion of the subscription setup. The renewal is automatic and doesn't 'ping' that page.
1) You want to be using the item_number parameter. Set this in your HTML form shown to the customer, and it will be returned to you by the paypal IPN, so you can put a database row ID in here, and use it to match up to the right person later.