I'm looking for a payment provider (or any other method) of taking payments with credit card details. Then immediately transfer the money to one of possibly hundreds of bank accounts (This has to be based on bank account number and sort code).
Does anyone know of a provider or other way of doing this?
This sounds like you want to integrate two technologies, a credit card processing service for bringing money in and then an ACH API for sending money out.
You can either look for two discreet services for doing this such as WePay and BancBox (cc and ACH respectively) or look at integrated services that provide both technologies such as Balanced (whom I work with).
Then depending on if you're taking the payments in directly on your site or not, you should be able to map from a card to a bank account and shoot the money out to the correct bank account via the ACH API once you've received the funds.
One thing to consider is that there is a 30 day window for disputes on credit cards, called a chargeback, and you could be liable for this and caught short if you've already sent the money on its way to the recipient.
Related
I am currently working on a project on which one user can personally send files or documents to other users. If the sender wants he could set a price for the file and the receiver have to pay in order to download that file. I have decided to use PayPal for the payment processes.
Now from each transaction(of money), I want a little commission from the money that the sender gets.
At first I had a idea of receiving all the payments(form the receiver) on my personal account, keep some commissions and transfer the remaining to the sender. But it would make the entire process so difficult and hard to maintain. I have currently read this and I am wandering if that gives you some commission for the transactions or it doesn't?
Ultimately, my question is: Can you get some commissio n(or money) using PayPal payee. (or directly sending the money form sender to receiver)?'
Setting a payee does not split off any commission. It is a direct payment between two other accounts.
You could see about requesting access to Payouts, and use that for separate outgoing transactions after receiving full amounts into your own account.
I am starting a business and I would like to offer Paypal as a payment option, but for my business it is essential to be able to block an amount of money, just like a car rental or a hotel does on a credit card. Would it be possible to block an amount from my users PayPal account and release it or book it for good later?
My business is of course an online service, and I want to do this pragmatically in a Spring based application.
I think what you are looking for is Authorization and capture.
I haven't used that feature from Paypal, but have used it elsewhere. What you are looking for is usually called card authorization, preauthorization, or preauth.
Yes it's possible
PayPal's REST API offer 3 primary ways to ensure you paid for product/services that you give to your customers
sale. Makes an immediate payment so you get paid immediately
authorize. Authorizes a payment for capture later.(this is what you see in a car rental or hotel)
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/payments/authorize-and-capture-payments/
order. Creates an order. - which gives you the flexibility to
multiple to do multiple authorizations and captures (these are for
complex use cases such as when you buy a computer from Dell you would
be authorized for the desktop, monitor, keyboard at different points
of time based on availability and then the funds captured when they
are shipped)
I understand there are a number of account aggregators out there which allow businesses to get access to customers's transaction data (Plaid, Yodlee, Intuit Customer Account API, open to others...). I'd like to know which ones DO or DON'T also allow for:
Determining the DUE-DATE of a customer's credit card balance.
Making PAYMENTS across accounts and parties.
Response from Yodlee
1) Determining the DUE-DATE of a customer's credit card balance
Yes , Yodlee do provide credit card bill due-date though their API.
2) Making PAYMENTS across accounts and parties.
Yodlee does have a Bill-Pay product but it's not available to API customers as of today.
I've been working with a loan repayment API and ran into this issue as well with Plaid. For US banks only, it seems that there are three items you need for this system:
The bill due date (and amount) for the credit card
The banking information. At a minimum, a user's routing and account number (which Plaid can provide) and the credit card's banking information (their routing and account number for direct payments).
An ACH processor or US bank that will let you upload a NACHA file. This is the step that actually moves the money from one account to the other. Expect lots of compliance paperwork from the partner that you use.
It's a complicated world when you try to pay on behalf of a user. Outside of programming, get a good lawyer who knows bank law!
Response from Plaid (as of 9/22/2014): No/Not yet and No
"1) Within a customer's credit information, does Plaid provide their credit card bill due-date? what would be the appropriate call for that?
Currently no, but it's something we may add in the future.
2) Does Plaid offer anything by way of making payments or money transfers across accounts? (I'm assuming 'no,' but just want to confirm)
We do not, however we can help with the authorization of accounts for ACH & Wire transfers. Feel free to reach out directly for more information."
I need to be able to initiate transactions between two unknown parties via Paypal, say donor and recipient, without ever having to be exposed to the money itself - is this possible?
Basically, I want a donor to be able to click the donate button, fill in the amount and then be passed to Paypal to verify their details. My site will also supply the recipients account details to Paypal so the money goes directly to them rather than to my Paypal account. Essentially I want to enable transactions without having any legal or tax responsibilities for the money.
This needs to happen for an unlimited number of donors and recipients.
Can I do this? Paypal haven't been very helpful at all.
I am sorry to hear that you feel PayPal hasn't been helpful at all, but there are many resources at your disposal. It sounds like you have just not been asking the right person, or asking the right questions. Customer service for large corporations are difficult to traverse, but there are many people at PayPal who would have been easily able to answer your questions.
I always say this, though i'm not sure how many times on this forum: It is possible to do whatever you want with PayPal. Give me your idea, I will give you the way. Whatever you want to do can be done with the right coding.
You can use Website Payments Standard (WPS), and you would only need your merchant's email address to create buttons that go to their account. (set the business variable)
You can also use third party API calls for Website Payments Pro (WPP) and Express Checkout (EC) to process direct credit card transactions as well as PayPal payments via API for your merchants. (set the subject variable to the seller you're submitting the API on behalf of)
As for not having any legal or tax responsibilities for offering the service of payment connectivity (marketplace functionality) between sellers and merchants: IMHO you are dreaming. However, you will want to contact your local legal and tax representative to ask what liability you have. Though this should go without saying; this is StackOverflow, where you should ask questions regarding programming, not tax and legal advice.
Your tax and legal concerns are separate concerns, irrelevant to the technical question of whether it is possible to do what you want with PayPal or not.
I have a bit of experience setting up online payment systems that accept credit card numbers and then pass them over to a gateway for a one time payment.
However, I now need to setup a system that can handle automatic recurring billing - where a user provides their credit card number and is automatically billed on a monthly basis from that point forward.
I am wondering what the best way to approach something like this is? (I notice that Paypal Payflow Pro does have a recurring billing feature, but I am a bit unclear on how it works.)
Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing? If possible, I would greatly prefer to avoid keeping a local record of credit card numbers for repeat processing.
Thanks (in advance) for your help.
There's a midpoint between building your own recurring billing and Auth.net's ARB or PayPal's recurring billing (both of which have their disadvantages). There are a number of providers that handle all the details and complexities of recurring billing, and simply report the charges to your payment gateway for processing at the interval you determine.
The most critical piece to look at is which services to credit card tokenization and support credit card data portability - this will ensure that your customer data isn't locked in with a billing provider and that you can take it with you if you choose another provider in the future. This also means that these providers store the customer credit card data for you, so you can greatly reduce your PCI compliance.
Take a look at Recurly (Disclaimer: I manage their customer and technical support) and Braintree. Both services will handle your recurring billing, credit card tokenization, and support credit card data portability.
Recurring billing is easy to handle and offload to a third party if your recurring amount is constant (e.g. the amount a user pays never changes in amount or frequency). Services like Authorize.Net's Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) and Paypal Payflow Pro recurring billing allow you to have those companies handle the actual recurring payments which means you don't have to store credit card information on your servers or even do anything once the subscription is created through their APIs.
If your subscriptions will vary in terms of cost or frequency, you'll need to use a service like Authorize.Net's Customer Information Manager (CIM) to create payment profiles for your customers. Basically you're storing credit card information on Authorize.Net's servers and whenever you want to make a subscription payment you tell Authorize.Net to charge the amount due to that payment profile. The drawback to this is you essentially have to build your own subscription system.
You usually find the recurring billing features in middleware gateways like Payflow Pro. In that case, it is invoked by a variation of the API you use for card processing. You usually set up the time span between billings and they perform the billing. You usually then reconcile the billing with the report that your processor sends you each month. In some cases, the payment gateway will post a notification to you that the billing was performed. You still have to reconcile the payments with the processor report because sometimes the notifications fail.
Canceling the recurring billing is also another API call.
If your gateway doesn't have the recurring feature, you obviously have to set up the billing yourself. This of course leads to storing card info and so forth. In this case, you usually tell the processor that it is a recurring transaction (which the gateway will do for you) so you get a discount on the transaction fees.
First, let apend the statement above "...tell the processor that it is a recurring transaction ...so you get a discount on the transaction fees". The true cost of credit card processing is a percentage fee and a per item fee based on the type of card presented ( and some other factors I won't delve into here.) The point being, on a wholesale price plan, the price would be the same regardless of whether it was recurring or not because there are no special rates for 'recurring' in interchange. But I digress.
"Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing?"
Don't take on storing credit card data no matter what. You can't afford the liability.
The right choice depends on several factors.
As to credit card portability, has anyone gone to Wells Fargo/ First Data and gotten their data out? (Braintree ISO/MSP). I guarantee it won't be pretty no matter what so I would focus on the right long term solution, rather than the exit strategy, though it will certainly weigh in.
Here's questions that need to be answered:
How many transactions per month? For very low volume, maybe a few hundred, pick paypal pro. It's easy to get into/ out of.
Are people more likely to pay with consumer cards or business credit cards? Interchange optimization is important if business cards. (CenPOS automatically optimizes the transaction for lowest interchange qualification, paypal and authorize.net do not)
What methods does my client accept payments? self pay on internet only? Phone orders? Mobile payments (special events or retail)? Choose a gateway that fits all their needs.
Do you need to charge on specific days- ie the 1st and 15th? Or any time? If on specific days, how will you prorate? Check the answer against the gateway flexibility.
What happens when a card expires?
What happens when a transaction is declined?
Who will need to see the payment data for customer service? How will they access it?
Determine your needs, then figure out which ones meet them.
For the record, CenPOS is the most robust solution, but may require more steps to integrate since they are newer to ecommerce.
Disclaimer: I've been a business user of paypal and authorize.net for probably a decade and more recently CenPOS. I'm also an authorize.net reseller, and CenPOS direct agent.
Just a heads-up about Payflow Gateway's Recurring Billing:
Their Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) is a fantastic feature, but only applies to their legacy APIs. For the time being, THE ONLY WAY to be notified by PayPal of a successful (recurring) billing transaction, is by inquiry. You will need to maintain a schedule to inquire, and send an individual inquiry for each, scheduled recurring billing transaction, one at a time. PayPal will not notify you if, for example:
A transaction is approaching
A transaction has occurred
This transaction was successful
This transaction resulted in fault
A credit card is approaching expiration
A dispute occurred
... and so on.
In my opinion, this renders their service useless.