I am researching building a marketplace-type site where users can create their own stores and I would take a percent of the sale. This is possible using Paypal's chained payments, but from their documentation, it appears this requires using a modal box of Paypal's site and form. Is there any way to process chained payments with something like their Website Payments Pro, which would allow users to remain on the same site the whole time? I feel this would look more professional.
Alternately, if there is a non-PayPal service that can do this, please let me know.
Have you considered using an alternative to Chained Payments? Could you manage that business logic from your backend instead and initiate multiple API-driven Payments Pro transactions?
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I have an educational website that uses 'Stripe Connect' to accept payments from students, and split the payments between myself (the platform provider) and the teachers (content-creators).
Payments to teachers are currently handled through Stripe. Whenever a student purchases content, the teacher automatically receives the payment directly into their Stripe account. I retain a portion of the transaction directly into my Stripe account. It's an easy system and works nicely.
The problem is that students want to pay with PayPal.
So, I would like to add PayPal as a payment option for students, without forcing content-creators to connect two separate accounts--one for when viewers pay with PayPal, and another for when viewers pay with Stripe. The only idea I have so far, is to deposit all PayPal payments to one PayPal account, then manually "payout" teachers into their Stripe accounts every week.
But is there an automated way to do this? Stripe says they don't accept payments from PayPal.
Any ideas/help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Adaptive payments does support chained payments, as Andrew says in his answer; it would work very much like what you describe having set up with Stripe.
However, this will not meet your requirements of having both PayPal and Stripe payments arrive in a single teacher account. Unfortunately, Stripe & PayPal see each other as competitors and to my knowledge neither one has built a tidy product to consolidate "their" payments into the other company's account.
If you are willing to move away from Stripe, PayPal does provide many solutions that consolidate "raw" credit card payments and PayPal account payments into a single receiver account, including through Adaptive Payments as cited by Andrew.
I would add that Braintree, having been purchased by PayPal, provides perhaps the most Stripe-like integration for a product that would accomplish this goal. However, I do not believe that the Braintree SDK will do the chained payments for you; you might have to do some work to make that happen on your end (take the first payment, then calculate and make payouts either weekly as you mentioned or per-incoming-transaction).
A couple other things to think about: if you split some payments into delayed fulfillment but others are chained inside one payments provider you will need to support two very different flows; you may find it easier (for both you and your content providers) to select one model and run everything through that model.
Also, instead of payments going to you & then chained to the content providers you could have payments to go directly to the content providers and then trigger billing (either invoicing or automatically collected via recurring payments) from the content providers to you for your cut.
The best pattern depends largely upon how you want the legal & financial responsibilities to lie: are you providing the good or service and people are paying you for it, making you like a retail store or distributor for producers? Or are content providers providing the good or service being paid for to the students, and you are like a marketplace/facilitator/advertising venue? This question becomes significant as soon as someone is unsatisfied with something they have bought :).
You can use the Adaptive Payments platform with PayPal to split payments just like you're doing with Stripe. Specifically, you'd use the Pay API setup as a chained payment with a secondary receiver.
If you happen to be working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make all of the API calls very simple for you.
I'm going to offer my customers a selection of subscriptions to digital content. I want the customer to be able to add or delete subscriptions later, with as little hassle as possible.
It seems that if I use Paypal vault, I can collect the card information on the same subscriptions screen without multiple redirects and later change the monthly total without another checkout process or even customer sending approval to Paypal!
Does Paypal allow this? It seems too easy and also too permissive. Also, do I need to worry about PCI compliance?
Does anyone know a better way to do this (with or without Paypal)? I don't know how to use paypal recurring payments without a lengthy checkout if they ever change their subscriptions. Google wallet does not have subscription cancellation in their API! Several other alternatives only allow preset subscription amounts.
The CSC/CVV is missing from the examples here: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/store-a-credit-card/ which makes me think you cannot use the card at will. The customer is probably going to be asked for authorisation.
Normally your online payment provider needs to support recurring payments (installments, subscriptions). PayPal does, there's a specific API:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/installment_buttons/
For the customer it's one-off, then the card is billed, say, monthly.
I am currently using payments standard and moving to payments pro. Both are on paypal hosted pages.
Whenever I am testing however, I seem to be directed to the payments standard page rather than the payments pro page. Is there a particular change in the URL i am meant to use? I cant see anything in the documentation that say this is the case.
Cheers
It depends on how you're trying to process payments.
Payments Standard and the Hosted Checkout are two different payment methods but can look kind of similar. With Payments Pro you can use Direct Payment API calls to process credit cards directly from your website or redirect your buyers to a secure PayPal site to complete payments.
The URL you use for the secure checkout page through Payments Pro is different. You should be redirecting buyers to https://payflowlink.paypal.com for the live site and https://pilot-payflowlink.paypal.com for test transactions.
I am new to PayPal integrating and need to integrate PayPal recurring for subscriptions. I googled for that, but I am confused with below questions.
Which API should I use with PayPal recurring, WPS or Paypal express checkout? Which one will be good?
Is there any good example or help to integrate this?
Thanks a ton in advance.
Good overview of recurring payments: Handling recurring payments
I'm using the Lionite PHP Paypal class. It's not free, but even if you're not going to use it, read through that page because it contains some useful info that is omitted from the Paypal docs.
If I understand correctly, Express Checkout requires your customer to set up a Paypal account, so Website Payments Standard would be a better option.
Unfortunately the Paypal SDK only has code examples for direct payment. If you want to use Website Payments Pro with Direct Payment, be aware of PCI compliance (which can be expensive and time-consuming) and also be aware that services like BrainTree exist which have transparent redirect, thus helping you to avoid PCI compliance (I haven't used this service however).
Express checkout code example: https://github.com/hrendoh/PayPal-Recurring-Payment-example
Set up your sandbox account at http://developer.paypal.com
Update: IPN for recurring payments is a nightmare. Not only are the recurring payment IPN responses completely undocumented, but none of the support staff I talked to had a clue about them either (in some cases they gave me incorrect answers to questions). Here is a list that others have put together, but all of these resources are incomplete:
https://www.x.com/developers/community/blogs/ppmacole/recurring-payments-ipns?page=1
http://docs.ipn-easy.com/html/T_Rolosoft_IpnEasy_Net_PayPal_TxnType.htm
Unfortunately because of the limits placed on recurring payments with express checkout, direct payment was the only option for me. I strongly suggest that if you need to do direct payment with recurring payments that you find a different payment provider.
I am looking to set up a recurring payment option for my website. I was thinking of going with PayFlow since it does not require expensive SSL. But I am not sure how to set up a recurrence payment where if the user decides to change the account type, we can automatically set up recurring payment for them to get charged next month. Not sure if this is possible?
A few problems, they charge almost $60/month and they require to have a Merchant Account (any suggestions)?
Can some one help with what type of service should I use? I am looking to not have credit card acceptance on my webpage because SSL is really expensive.
The webpage is in php.
PayPal Express Checkout does this, and more. While Payflow Link is generally a good and robust solution, Express Checkout has a bit more to offers in terms of features. It also redirects your buyers to a PayPal landing page for entering their card details.
I assume you can simply delete / disable a recurring payments profile and set up a new one whenever someone switches plans, right? In that case you'll want to look at the CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile API.
Have a look at https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECRecurringPayments and https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1168
Do keep in mind however, that recurring payments on Express Checkout only works with existing PayPal accounts. Someone who doesn't have a PayPal account yet, will have to create one during checkout.
Paypal is usually a great solution. There is no problem with billing recurring payments (subscriptions).
You can read all about it here:
https://www.paypal.com/pdn-recurring