We run a service where, amongst other things, members can exchange "digital goods" and are setting up to allow PayPal adaptive payments to cover to 'purchase for real money' aspect.
PayPal requires that we set the chain like this:
buyerMember -> sellerMember -> usTheService
The problem I am experiencing (payments themselves work great!) is that the buyer and seller members can look at their PayPal logs and see the name, mailing address, and maybe even the phone number of each other (mainly the sellerMember, as 'merchant' sees pretty much everything about the buyerMember
Our members would prefer not to exchange their physical mailing address (or, probably, in some cases not even their PayPal email account address) with other members.
Is there some way that I, as the adaptive payments API use, can suppress this personal information from being available between the members?
I see the same issue and the only solution I have come up with is not to chain payments. Instead, after I receive payment confirmation with payment details (e.g. which product was purchased), I invoke massPay to the seller. Since these are digital goods, I can make it real-time if I choose. But, as per policy I established with sellers, I delay payment (at least) 48 to 72 hours to be able to handle refund requests from the buyer.
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I am a college student and I want to launch an online store for dropshipping. I am allowed to have one credit card, where I live, say Mastercard. But for the customers convenience I would like to enable VISA, Discover, Mastercard, American express, Debit card, and PayPal checkout. I know that there is a PayPal credit card that allows payments from all these cards but it requires a business license, which I am not allowed to have as a student. Is there a way I can receive payments from the above mentioned cards to a Mastercard? If there is a better solution to my problem I would like to hear it from you. Thanks!
When you set up an online store, you will also be signing up with a Payment gateway that will be collecting money on your behalf and transferring it to you. In this way, you will be able to set up your store to be able to accept any payment methods supported by the payment gateway(s) that you set up, and any money you make will be transferred from the gateway to the account that you registered with. This might be a credit card or directly to a bank account depending on what the gateway supports.
Using a trusted payment gateway (such as Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.) will let you focus on your store and not have to worry about accepting credit card information directly, and you will get your earnings transferred to you regularly in a form that you can accept. Note also that taking credit card info directly comes with a host of security concerns and regulations. By using a payment gateway you will never see anyone's credit card info directly, so you won't have to worry about all the security and legal concerns surrounding that. The gateway companies make their money by taking a small transaction fee for each purchase, but this fee is definitely worth it to get your business started.
My use case: buyer buys service from seller, our app facilitates and guaranties the transaction. It should work in the way that buyer sends the money to us, we check if buyer received the service, in that case we send the money to seller. Otherwise we refund the buyer. Important is to have 2 payments solutions for the buyer: paypal account and card payment without account. The whole use case is international.
I'm testing this in sandbox environment.
Possible solutions:
Adaptive payments - Delayed chained payments:
Works fine. Disadvantage is that the seller must grant us permission so that the refund works. The problem here is that the permission api is under maintenance, so i am waiting for all the changes https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/permissions-service/integration-guide/PermissionsWhatsNew/ . Is this big deal?
Express checkout Authorize/Capture + Mass Pay:
Works OK. Advantage here is that in case of refund (void after authorize) we don't have to pay the fee. Disadvantage here is that I'm not sure if authorize holds the funds, so that even buyer without account paying with card cannot touch the money and I can capture them in 3 days. Another issue is that when I authorize 40$ from PayPal account with 30$ balance, I capture the whole 40$. How come?
I have no previous experience with PayPal I now the app should work on international scale. Please if you have any tips, articles or practical experience with this use case share it!
EDIT:
Delayed Chained Payment is great. I solved the issue by making my application the secondary receiver and the seller primary one. Seller must grant a permision to my app in case of refunds, but there is no better way.
However, now the issue is that when buyer pays without account (Guest Payment - with card) all receivers must be Business or Premier account holders:
Each receiver of a guest payment must be a verified PayPal business or premier account holder.
Source: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/adaptive-payments/Pay_API_Operation/
The issue is that in sanbox it works even if the primary receiver (seller) is NOT Business or Premiere account. What is wrong?
1) Do you have yourself set as the primary receiver? If so, I don't think you would need to have permissions granted unless you had already run ExecutePayment to push the money to the secondary receiver account. If you're refunding before that happens you shouldn't need permissions (though I haven't tested this specifically, so I could be wrong.)
2) Regarding the fee, if you refund a payment that went through Adaptive then PayPal would refund the fee back to you, so you're not really gaining anything here as far as that goes.
The authorizations can be tricky. I theory, the authorized funds should be guaranteed for 3 days, but you still capture within 30 days (or maybe 60) even though it may or may not have funds available at that point (it would simply succeed or fail).
You could run a Reauthorization after the first 3 days to get yourself an additional 3 days of guaranteed funds, but I don't think you can do that more than once.
Much of that depends on the card issuing banks, though. Even though PayPal's docs may specify certain things regarding how authorizations work, if the card issuing bank has different rules associated with their credit cards that could throw things off.
As for why a $40 auth would work when the PayPal balance is only $30, I think that may be because of secondary funding sources. If you have bank account and/or credit cards setup in the account, PayPal would assume it can pull from those sources when the time comes to capture if the PayPal funds alone don't cover it. Depending on your use-case this may or may not be ideal.
You are mixing multiple concepts with this question. There are different PayPal PAYMENT products (adaptive with chained payments vs express checkout) and then there is the question of authorizations vs immediate payments.
Agree with Andrew that fees in the refund case is not the right basis to choose a solution. Much more significant is what the sender & receivers will see in their accounts (payments to/from you, or from/to the other party?), simplicity/reliability of the overall system (can an error on your side cause failed or multiple payments?), liability, and even regulatory questions (e.g., are you acting as an escrow service?).
If PayPal gives you an auth from a PayPal buyer it means that PayPal guarantees (with certain very limited exceptions) that it will honor a capture of those funds within the specified time and amount limits (which can vary with the specific scenario). PayPal might make that guarantee based on the sender's balance, credit cards, bank accounts, or combination of factors. You as the recipient needn't care - that is between PayPal and the buyer. (And it's PayPal's limits/conditions which apply to that auth, NOT the conditions of the sender's underlying credit card/bank/etc; PayPal protects you from that complexity.)
In contrast if the auth is from a card network rather than a PayPal account (ie the user gives card info rather than using a PP account, whether or not PayPal is your payment processor), then that network specifies and controls the conditions of the auth.
PS: if you are waiting for Adaptive Payments changes, you may have a long wait. Release 89 was quite some time ago and PayPal's priorities are on the RESTful APIs, not Adaptive.
We are a UK-based marketplace site that wants to never force buyers to sign up for paypal. We allow users to set up customized stores through our site, and our second requirement is that these users be able to become sellers with only a basic paypal account. When a buyer makes a purchase, we are the primary receiver, taking 15% and passing on the entire paypal fees to the secondary receiver (user), as well as all the remainder of the transaction. My question is: What's the best solution paypal offers for this? It seems that chained payments would be, but if I understand correctly the Website Payments Pro system is the only one that guarantees that buyers outside the UK wouldn't need a paypal account. Is there a way to take the money in ourselves with Website Payments Pro and use the API so it transfers the 85% (minus the fees) to the user's paypal account?
It depends on what approach you want to take.
I would prefer Chained Payments as it allows guest checkout (credit card payments outside a PayPal account) with certain restrictions and will easily allow the user to receive the funds and automatically forwards the 15% cut to your account. This removes the need to collect funds outside of the payment flow. This means no invoicing or no lost dues!
Website Payments Pro only offers credit card payments however you would also need to offer Express Checkout for PayPal payments as well. You also have the flexibility of hosting the order form so you control what the users see. The downside is you'd have to collect funds from the user outside the payments. Such as monthly invoicing, billing agreements or manual processing.
Here is the criteria we use to allow guest checkout. Please keep in mind these are due to rules and regulations, not PayPal's choosing.
The credit card has a lifetime limit of 10 purchases outside a PayPal account
The user's email address must not be attached to an existing PayPal account
I don't have a direct answer for you but hopefully this helps make your decision.
I working on an e-commerce site where I need to do something like this.
When the users is on payment page, he should be doing the following things:
- pays a fee
- authorize the payment of an amount (which could vary, but not with a big amount...)
Up to here, everything goes find with PayPal Direct payment system.
But I need more. I need that the authorized amount at some point to be directly charged by another seller (or transferred)
Any chance I can do this with PayPal Direct (such the the payment would still be made in site)? Or is there any other method?
If you're receiving the money via DoDirectPayment you could use MassPay or Pay to send funds to a 3rd party. If you want the split to happen within the original payment you can use Pay by itself and set it up as a parallel or chained payment. See the Adaptive Payments documentation for more details on that.
(Disclaimer: I am employee) Balanced will work for your use case
capturing cards directly without sending user to a third party site
paying out to a merchant of your choice via ACH payout at a later point in time.
The caveat is it's US only so if your outside the US let me know and I'll see if I can find any other options for you.
I wanna build a web store for selling people's second hand products.
A customer adds the products into a shopping cart.
He/she pays (credit card, bank account) for it and I get the money.
The seller sends the bought products to the customer.
I get send the money to the seller (and have taken a fee for it).
People tend to mention Amazon's, Google's and PayPal's payment service but recently I came across services like Chargify and Recurly.
My questions:
How do these two differ from the other three?
Which one would support the above mentioned transaction process?
How should I set up the above transaction process?
The "big 3" require an account. How do I charge with just a credit card or bank account only?
Thanks!
Thanks for thinking of Chargify.
We're not the right thing for your need... we focus on helping a business manage many things involved in recurring billing of customers.
For what you want to do, I think one of the "Big 3" is the way to go. You've got the extra "wrinkle" of this, however: you're essentially collecting money on behalf of each Seller, and each Seller may be selling very different things and will have different levels of honesty, etc.
All of my experience is with merchants that have a traditional merchant account and payment gateway, which together allow them to charge credit cards. But the banks that issue merchant accounts want to know what each merchant (each Seller) is about. I'm 99% sure the banks dislike a single merchant account being used to sell / collect credit card payments for more than one merchant.
Anyway, to the degree that it's useful, I wrote a blog post last year about merchant accounts and payment gateways. It may be helpful to you as you explore options:
https://lancewalley.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/merchant-accounts-payment-gateways/
See my answer in Online payments for a middleman.
PayPal Adaptive Payments allows you to accept guest payments, without requiring buyers to have a PayPal account.
Another thing to think about is regional availability; Amazon / Google may sound interesting, but are not very useful if you don't live in the US or UK. Whereas PayPal Adaptive Payments is available pretty much globally (with the exception of a few countries where PayPal hasn't launched yet).