Take a percentage of your clients online payment profits - paypal

I'm a freelancer and I'm negotiating with a potential client for a full e-commerce website using PayPal Payment Pro.
They want to list and sell everything from cheap fittings/fixtures to very expensive furniture on there new website.
It's a BIG job, and everything would be designed and developed bespoke. Right now were at the £2,500 mark, but I don't think they're going to agree... However, I had a thought.
They make a great profit just from instore sales. I'd be happy to reduce the design/development price by 50% (to possibly 65%) if they agree to give me 3% to 5% of all online sales.
My question is, how would I do this with PayPal Payment Pro?
I can record all online sales and invoice them for 3% to 5% each month, but I'd rather it be done automatically. I can't find any documentation on how to do this, any ideas?

What I would recommend is integrating Express Checkout and Pro into the website like usual, and then install Instant Payment Notification on the server to automate payments from the website owner to you.
Within the IPN script you can setup a Pay API request that submits the payment from the website owner's account to your account accordingly. You can calculate your commission from within this based on the order total and push the funds to your account.
IPN occurs in real-time (or at least generally very close to it) so the procedure would be completely automated at that point and you would get your commission payments immediately when each order goes through.

Related

Best way to split a payment using the Smart Payments Button

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.

PayPal Adapative Payments

I'm considering using either PayPal's adaptive payments or Stripe (depending on setup time) for a new web application! I've heard the approval process can take weeks with PayPal but I'm hoping this isn't the case. Can anyone answer the following questions for me;
Can I use adaptive Payments with a standard business account?
Does the account need to be verified and if so, how long does this take?
What if anything can I do to speed the process up?
1) Yes.
2) Yes. Verification can be instant if you have an online banking account compatible with PayPal's verification system. Otherwise you have to wait for them to deposit to small amounts into your account and then verify those amounts once you see them, which can take a few days depending on your bank.
3) Get all of your specs worked out and a demo put together on the PayPal sandbox, and then submit everything very clearly to PayPal when you do the application for you App ID. As long as everything is pretty straight forward they've been auto-approving apps pretty much instantly. If you have something unique about your application that they need to look into further it can take a few days to get done depending on the details.
Keep in mind that Stripe is credit cards only. PayPal Adaptive Payments is the whole PayPal wallet aspect of things, with credit card payments available through "guest checkout."
There are advantages and disadvantages to both. If I knew more about your application plans I could give you a better recommendation on which one you should go with, but I can tell you right now PayPal wins in almost every instance, in my opinion.

Online payments for a middleman

I'm new to online payments and would like some opinions on my task. Here is the scenario:
I have a website where people buy and sell digital photos. A seller has a photo and wants to sell it. They create an ad on the site and upload the photo into the website database. Buyers looking for photos come to the site and buy them. The buyer pays the asking amount and then can download the photo. As the middleman, I'd like to charge the seller a fee or percentage of the selling price. The buyer shouldn't pay any website fees, just the selling price.
My question is - what is the best way to do this? I dont mean programmatically, but what service should I be looking at? As far as I know PayPal wont work because of their fee structure. Im told Amazon payments would work but its sort of a hack. The seller has to set up a business account and then tie their item to my website as a third party sales venue. Is there an easire way to accomplish what Im trying to do? Of course keeping fees as low was possible.
This will work perfectly fine with PayPal.
PayPal offers Adaptive Payments as of a while ago, which allows you to specify 'primary' and 'secondary' receivers (up to 10 recievers per 1 transaction I believe, from the top of my head).
You could thus use Adaptive Payments to set the photographer as the primary receiver, set yourself as the secondary receiver and optionally move the transaction fees onto the photographer as well.
Have a look at this page for more information.

How to test on Live paypal site with dummy credit cards [duplicate]

I just wanted to ask among the gurus here if anyone has ever attempted to test a complete transaction from start to end on an ecommerce site using paypal or any other epayment gateway.
Please guys, I would appreciate any thoughts and comments. As it is a live site, I cant use the sandbox as that will negatively impact sales. However my firm is a startup and so can't afford the complete transaction and refund process that was suggested [here]:Accepting dummy credit cards on a live site with ActiveMerchant & PayPal.
Please help!
Previously I tested by buying low cost items from myself - that way you're only paying commission and you're getting most of the moneyback.
Admittedly you need 2 Paypal accounts, but that shouldn't be a problem, and you should only have to 'kick the tyres' in the live environment because all your testing will have been done in the dev environment.
We had a similar problem during startup and still use this process in the live site. We have specific "test" products that we purchase using a live credit card, then monitor the transactions: purchase, decline purchase, subscription (recurring billing), cancel, refund, etc.
Our test product is priced very low (5 cents). For subscriptions, the billing interval is 1 day, for a maximum of 3 intervals (with a free trial period of 1 day). This allows me to run a full test/validation, including recurring billing, in the live environment in less than a week.
We refund all charges following the test, which puts the money back on the credit card (or back in the PayPal account). Because of the refunding, our sales impact is zero (offsetting sale and refund). It does cost us a small non-refundable PayPal fee for each transaction, but that amounts to $1 or less.
These "test" products are not exposed to normal users. Also, we manually verify any "test" sales to make sure they are part of our internal testing.
"Sandbox" testing is the way to go during development, but a periodic test in the live environment is necessary to be verify that nothing is amiss.
Why not use a real credit card, then give yourself a refund? The commision fee is returned in that case.
All the time that I want to test our live sites we use a real credit card.
Thanks
I don't understand why you can't use the sandbox..?? How would using it negatively impact your sales? It's all fake.
Just setup your own sandbox.yourdomain.com version of your site and use that as your test server. Configure it to use PayPal's sandbox with sandbox API credentials, etc. This will allow you to go all the way through an order process and test everything from the UI stuff to payment processing, API requests/response processing, IPN, etc.
When everything is working you sync it up with your live server, which is hitting the live PayPal server, of course.
Again, I don't see how that would impact you in any way other than being a successful testing solution..??

Recurring Payments in PayPal

I am trying to use the Recurring payment API offered by PayPal.
I have a scenario which I am not able to address directly. It goes like this.
We have a website where we sell some services. Now the services are charged per user license. A user can buy/cancel user license in between. We want to offer the customer a recurring billing option. We have to notice here that the amount may vary each billing cycle based on the number of user licenses the customer uses during that cycle.
Is there any way I can achieve this using PayPal recurring Payment API's.
I realize this is a very old post, but it still shows up for Google searches, so I thought I'd add:
Paypal does allow you to do this now, using their new adaptive payments api.
Authorize.net also has a service that might work called Customer Information Manager.
The recurring payment option is a fixed amount that the customer pre-agrees to pay each month (or period). To do what you're trying to do, a customer would have to pre-agree to pay whatever amount you decide to charge at a later time. This means pre-authorizing an unknown payment amount, which will not be allowed by any payment service.
Your only options are:
Bill the variable amount each month (i.e. no subscription).
Set up a subscription where the monthly amount is the maximum that could potentially be billed, and then refund the difference each month.
Good luck with #2 - I would never agree to such a thing as a customer, personally.
What you're looking for is covered in the UK by the Direct Debit system, however given the potential for abuse it's very tightly controlled and there are a lot of restrictions and regulations governing it.
I'd strongly suggest you just set up a monthly invoicing system that just bills the client each month.
I don't know its meaning full or not as it is a very old post.
Instead of creating recurring profile on PayPal Server, You can store the customer's credit card on the PayPal using REST API: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#vault then every month you can fetch it and charge it like recurring Payment Or When client is no longer with the services then just remove its card from PayPal.
I suppose Authorize.net SIM method also does the same.
Hope this make sense.