Use-case
A Trading-platform for selling goods where each subscriber can purchase and sell ( eg. eBay )
Trading-platform takes commission for each transaction
Flow of actions
Buyer execute a purchase
Funds are transferred from the buyer account to the Trading-platform account
PayPal takes it's transaction commission
Trading-platform takes it's commission
Trading-platform transfer the reminding funds from it's account to the Seller account
PayPal takes it's transaction commission
Problem at hand
As can be seen in the above 'Flow of actions' PayPal will charge for commission twice
this composite transaction model considerably complicates implementation/cost.
Feedback required
Is there any payment model with which this can be avoided?
Is there any payment model where for each transaction a subset of the total sum is sent to the trading platform account ?
Any help will be appreciated
You could use Adaptive Payments for this. With Adaptive Payments, you can split payments up and set who pays what fees.
Related
I understand that Paypal's MassPay can be used to, as a business, quickly make payments to multiple people. I also understand that the business sending the mass payment is responsible for the transaction fees, and that the recipients of the payments are not charged any further fees.
I am curious if it's possible to utilize MassPay to account for revenue shares / commissions when a buyer purchases a product through an eCommerce application.
For instance: my application allows users to buy and sell products. My business keeps 20% of every sale, and the seller receives the remaining 80%.
A seller sells a product for $100 to a buyer through my application. My business should receive $20, and the seller should receive $80. The buyer completes the checkout / purchase process by making a $100 payment through Paypal. My application has MassPay configured in a way that will send $20 of that $100 to my business's Paypal account, and the other $80 of that 100$ to the seller's Paypal account.
Is such a thing even possible?
if the answer is yes…
How will this appear in the Paypal accounts (activity / transaction history) of the buyer, the seller, and my business?
What if the buyer has a problem with the product they purchased, and they open a dispute with Paypal? Will they have to open a dispute for one transaction ($100), or two ($80 and $20)?
Because the buyer is the person making this mass payment, will they be charged additional fees in some way? Will those fees need to be factored into their purchase cost during the checkout process?
Thanks in advance.
You can absolutely use masspay to send "contingent" payments like rev shares and commissions; in fact this is the product's most common usage. It was built for that.
You may also be able to use PayPal products like chained or parallel payments to create multi-link payment flows.
In most cases you want payments to flow along with responsibilities/agreements. For example if I buy something (e.g. a t-shirt) I don't want to make multiple payments to supply chain members; I want to buy the shirt from someone and pay them, and it is their responsibility to take it from there; they may then owe a commission to someone (or to 10 different parties, I don't care), or they may owe a supplier (or a bunch of them)... not my problem.
So I strongly urge you to decide what model you want: is someone buying a product from you, and you will pay a supplier? is someone buying a product from a seller, and the seller will owe you a commission for providing the customer through your marketplace? Then set up your payment flows accordingly.
In the former case (ecommerce store) masspay is an excellent fit: the customer pays you and then you masspay (on a per-transaction or aggregated basis) payments to your suppliers. The buyer only sees the payment they are party to, which is their payment to you. Any dispute is between you and your buyer.
In the latter case (marketplace) the customer pays the full (total including commission) price to your sellers. Then you don't need to push a payment to your sellers but rather to collect a payment from them, so you would likely use invoicing or a billing agreement to collect your commissions.
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
Given a market place that has buyers and sellers exchanging goods. What is the best way to allow a buyer to make a purchase and with hold the money from the seller until the shipment has been received?
Chain payments force the primary recipient to be receive the majority payout. But if that is the case, we end up being force to pay the seller at point of sale instead of what the shipment is complete.
Buyer - pays the total amount
MarketPlace - receives percentage
Seller - receives majority of sale (after delivery confirmed)
Any thoughts on how to accomplish our goal with Paypal?
Thanks!
There are lots of things you can do and any of them could be the best solution. It seems like you are already on the right track with is adaptive payments. The type of adaptive payment I would go for would be a delayed chained payment. A delayed chained payment as described by paypal is
Delayed Chained Payments
By default, payments to all receivers in a chained payment are
immediate. However, you can choose to delay a payment to a secondary
receiver. For example, as primary receiver, you may require secondary
receivers to perform some action, such as shipping goods or waiting
for expiration of a return period, before making payment. To complete
the payment, you must explicitly execute a payment to secondary
receivers after the sender pays you. The payment must occur within 90
days, after which you cannot complete the payment as part of the
original chained payment.
You can find more info about this about a quarter of the way down the page here.
Hope this helps!
p.s. checkout their samples included with their sdk for the classic api here.
I am implementing the Paypal checkout system onto my site. Basically there is a seller, buyer, and my business. When the seller puts up something to sell and the buyer buys something, I (the business) get 10% of what the buyer pays. Is there a option in the Paypal api, or do I have to do it another way?
You can use Chained Payments in the Adaptive Payments API:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/gs_AdaptivePayments/
Chained payments enable 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.
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.