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.
Related
I have been building a marketplace application with an iOS app as front-end that drives the business. The app can accept payment either through a paypal account or a credit card. I have integrated Braintree iOS SDK into my app and linked the paypal business account in Braintree controlpanel. The funds processed using PayPal are being routed to the paypal and those processed using cards end up in the bank account linked with Braintree merchant.
Now, the core of the application is to take a certain commission and payout the rest to the sellers involved in transaction. I have taken the seller's PayPal ID at the time of registration to pay them.I have explored the PayPal docs and found that Payouts REST API does exactly what I need provided I maintain the required balance in the merchant account.This is where things came to a standstill. Specifically, I need to get confirmation on the below points
1.As there are two different places(paypal merchant and bank account
linked to braintree) where my funds are parked, Is there any
possibility that the transaction could directly be funded from the
bank account if the same is linked to both merchant accounts?
2.Will PayPal withdraw the entire amount at once or in partial
transactions.
Can anyone who have been in a similar situation suggest how to go about paying out the sellers. I am open to any alternative that satisfies all the requirements of the app.
I have a working paypal IPN, but ive been wondering: can I somehow set the "I have no paypal account" as the default choice when a customer is directed to paypal?
Short anwer: No, don't do that.
Long answer:
PayPal sets this dynamically based on customer information, primarily the cookie. In other words, people who have logged into PayPal on that device/browser before generally see that option presented first; people who have not are presented content that features the non-PayPal-login more prominently. This is done (primarily) to increase conversion for you (ie get the highest percentage of people to complete the payment & buy from you). Trying to defeat PayPal's code here would usually be counterproductive.
That said, there are also differences in how PayPal's screens are presented between various PayPal products (e.g. Payflow looks different from Express Checkout which looks different from Website Payments Standard) due in part to the mix of payment methods supported by each of these products, and also in part to expected customer mix with each of these. Some of these products also vary their behavior somewhat based on account settings or button/api parameters, again with the goal of being as effective for you as possible. But those parameters are product-specific and the question did not specify which PayPal product you are using.
As an example of variation between (and within) products:
Website Payments Standard (WPS) was designed to allow a merchant to accept payments from everyone, as the merchant's "sole solution." Express Checkout was originally designed to be used alongside a merchant's existing or separate credit card collection page, by merchant who would directly bill credit cards through a separate product (PayPal's DoDirectPayment or another processor). So PayPal's first WPS page was designed to present well to buyers with just credit cards or buyers with PayPal accounts. But a buyer would only be sent to the Express Checkout screen if they proactively chose to use PayPal rather than entering a credit card directly on the merchant's page, so PayPal's first Express Checkout screen could be aimed directly at PayPal account holders to generate the most intuitive buyer experience and highest conversion. Since that original version (ten years ago, in 2005!), however, Express Checkout has become more integrated into "PayPal Pro" and can also used as a sole solution, like WPS. For that usage it now supports an option that includes collecting card payments without a PayPal account.
PayPal also offers Payflow, Hosted Sole Solution, Adaptive Payments, and more payment flows.... each of which offers some slightly-different balances of buyer experience (and merchant experience/requirements -- e.g. some of these give the merchant access to credit card numbers and require PCI and merchant banking agreements, etc etc).
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.
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'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.