I'm working on a software project in a group of developers and we plan to sell the product via an electronic payment system such as PayPal. In this connection, we wonder if it would be possible to set up a business account with PayPal (or any other payment system) in a way that makes any received payment split according to a certain ratio and the shares automatically transferred to other accounts?
If it's possible with PayPal, how we do it or where do we find any help docs on this subject?
If you are wanting to split payments, you can use PayPal's Express Checkout or Adaptive Payments to split up the funds into different accounts. Using Express Checkout with parallel payments, you can split up the transaction up and the receivers of the payment will pay the fees according to the amount they received. The buyer will see the different receivers that were involved in the transaction. If you use Adaptive Payments you can set who pays the fees, and it can be set up so the buyer does not see the other parties involved.
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We're planning a web app that allows users to pay our clients directly through Paypal so there will be many different users and each will be paying a specific client through the website and there will be multiple clients.
These payments may be one-off payments but a few may be recurring.
We won't be charging a transaction fee for this so we basically want the whole payment amount to be deposited in the client's Paypal account (so they pay their own Paypal fees). I've looked at chained payments to be able to take a payment for a client but I'm just wondering what the actual flow of money is in a chained payment.
When a chained payment is made does Paypal deposit the payment go into our Paypal account first and then be paid into the client's account or does the client portion (in this case 100%) go directly into the client's account?
I'm asking as we're not sure how it would affect us in terms of accounting in our business if all the payment money was actually passing through our Paypal account (even if only briefly).
Or is a chained payment not the ideal solution for this?
Thanks,
Steve
If you are not taking a cut of the money, then I believe either Simple or Parallel payments would be a better solution. If you are going to be processing payments for a single buyer to a single merchant, then you can just use Simple Payments. If you are going to be processing payments for a single buyer to multiple merchants then you'd want to use Parallel Payments. More information on each of those APIs can be found here.
We have the following requirements for an online payment solution:
There are two types of users: Buyers and sellers.
Only digital stuff is exchanged.
When a buyer buys content, money is sent to the seller immediately as well as a small fraction of the money to the website owners.
A buyer must before he can sell his offerings connect his account (that may be PayPal or any other service) to the platform to be able to receive money.
Now, I'm not an expert in this field but my initial idea was to have a PayPal account with Mass Transactions enabled for this website which will receive all payments and then send money out to the sellers via API calls.
However, it would be very nice if it is possible to make this process completely external, a.k.a. use a service for payment which sends the bulk of the money to the seller but a small fraction to the shareholders (website owners). Of course, a seller must first connect his account to the platform to make sure in case one of his offerings was bought he can receive money.
Any ideas are well appreciated.
PayPal Adaptive Payments/Chained Payments might be the best option for you as it can be setup to automatically send a portion of your payments to other accounts.
Here is the overview of Adaptive Payments:
Adaptive Payments Overview
From the PayPal Documentation here is an exact definition of Chained Payments:
Chained payments allow a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver. The primary receiver keeps part of the payment and pays secondary receivers the remainder. For example, your application could be an online travel agency that handles bookings for airfare, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The sender sees only you as the primary receiver. You allocate the payment for your commission and the actual cost of services provided by other receivers. PayPal then deducts money from the sender’s account and deposits it in both your account and the secondary receivers’ accounts.
Here is the information on Chained Payments:
Chained Payment Developer Guide
Here is information on registering your Application, which will allow you to create the Sandbox API Calls:
PayPal APP Basics
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.
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'm struggling to understand PayPals documentation, but is Parallel Payments intended to pay multiple merchants from a single buyer?
A previous question asks for the difference between Parallel and Chained payments, but no mention of this fact is in the answer.
What I need to do is pay money into multiple PayPal accounts which may not be merchant accounts. In this case is Chained Payments my only option?
Any advice here would be much appreciated.
Yes. PayPal Adaptive Parallel Payments sends money from one buyer to multiple merchants.
PayPal Adaptive Chained Payments sends monety from one buyer, to 1 merchant (who can take his cut and will be the merchant of record) and the remainder is automatically forwarded to the second recipient.
Also take a look at Introducing Adaptive Payments
Parallel payments
Chained payments
In addition to a slightly different flow, chained payments also allows you to designate another recipient as the one to pay the fees.
For example, if receiver 1 is going to be merchant of record, but you want receiver 2 to pay all the fees, you could set that up with Adaptive Payments as well.