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.
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I am setting up the Paypal integration for a Clients website. He has a page where users can buy stuff that others users sell and he wants the buyers to pay using Paypal, he also wants the payment to be charged a fee, so that a percentage of the payment goes to the website owner and the remainder goes to the seller. For example:
Tom sells shirts at $20 each and i want to buy two, so i would pay $40 plus the 3% of the transaction, that would sum up to $41.2, $40 would go to Tom and $1.2 to the page owner.
How can i do this using Paypal? I have been reading a lot Smart Payments Button describes how to set a payment but the funds go to a single person, i need to set a chained payment, split payment or something alike and their docs seem very fuzzy.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks!
platform_fees , documented here , is the analogue to chained payments. However, it is only available to PayPal partners -- i.e., probably not your client.
For separate transaction payments to more than one receiver account, there is multi-seller payments.
After completing the Paypal Integration and after tears and pain i can tell that i couldn't use platform_fees.
The implementation is complete and working but i wrote to customer support and to dev support and they just don't want you to use platform_fees so nothing will work along that path.
The solution they provide and the one they want you to use is getting all the money on your account and then splitting it using Payouts to all the clients.
Really bad solution imo but its convenient for them because they charge more transactions instead of allowing you to do everything on a single transaction.
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.
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 am changing an existing paypal standard payments button, and would like to send money directly to 2 different people (seller, and website owner). Firstly, is this possible without diving into the API, and secondly, how do I go about doing it? I have had a read of quite a bit on the PayPal site, but have had no success so far.
Through a PayPal Payments Standard button, it's not possible to pay more than one person at a time. To pay two separate parties, you'd need to either:
Create two separate buttons
Use Express Checkout (which can process the payment to both parties in parallel)
Use Adaptive Payments (which can process the payment to both parties in parallel, or in a chained fashion)
I have a Paypal Standard gateway set up which pays the business account specified in the input no problem. I would like to make it so that at the same time, the customer is also paying a fee to the website - so they're paying our Paypal account a fee.
E.g. User buys a product (clicks Buy Now)
Goes to Paypal screen, and when the customer confirms the payment it will send the following money:
£10 - to the sellers account
£1.50 - to our account (fee)
I've heard a few methods such as Chain payments, Parallel payments and x.com says Adaptive payments, but I've not been able to understand the best method for doing this with a Paypal Standard integration.
Can someone point me in the right direction with this? Thanks in advance!
Adaptive Payments is a general term for the API's that handle this sort of thing. Chained Payments and Parallel Payments are under that same umbrella, so to speak.
Both chained and parallel payments will split your payment between multiple accounts like you're after. The primary difference is that the payer will see the split during checkout with a parallel payment, but you can hide that with a chained payment. You can also delay the secondary payment(s) using a chained setup.
If you happen to be working with PHP I'd recommend using my PHP class library for PayPal, which will make all of this very simple for you. I even offer 30 min of free training if you need help getting started, which is generally plenty of time to get you going if you understand how to work with array data.