I'm curious if there is a way to process/connect buyers and sellers on my site without the site having to charge the buyer and credit the seller. In other words, I don't want to touch the money, but I do want to integrate the process as much as possible on my site.
I guess what I'm asking is how do auction sites manage the transactions between buyer and seller? I really don't want my site to resort to emailing the buyer with the seller's contact information and saying .... "here's the sellers info. Good luck with that."
Ebay seems to allow a buyer to go to PayPal and pay the seller, but returns back to Ebay with payment confirmation. Even though the transaction is between Buyer and Seller, Ebay is able to retrieve some details about that transaction. Is this simply because Ebay owns PayPal, or can other sites do the same?
-This is an old question but the information is a bit off so I will try to re-answer.
It is all doable. There is no custom code going on like codingspace is suggesting.
Paypal has a number of checkout types, I have some decent experience with express checkout so I will try to answer with an example of those calls.
You set up the payment with a SetExpressCheckout call using your call back uri (so you see if the customer confirms) and the sellers info in the request (you will need appropriate information from the seller).
With that, once they confirm you can bill them with DoExpressCheckoutPayment using the sellers and info and the returned information from SetExpressCheckout.
And that is effectively the process. Pretty simple really.
In terms of taking a commission, you can't do it via that specific transaction. What most mass retailers do is keep a record of all the commissions and bill the seller at the end of the month. The other option is forcing sellers to buy prepay credit which is then used on commisions of each sale, this is what trademe.co.nz does (NZ's ebay.)
Let me know any questions.
I'm guessing you don't want to take a commission off of each sale on your site then. The only thing that comes to mind is to have the seller provide their own paypal "buy now" button after the sale that you can then give to the buyer.
Related
I am setting up the Paypal integration for a Clients website. He has a page where users can buy stuff that others users sell and he wants the buyers to pay using Paypal, he also wants the payment to be charged a fee, so that a percentage of the payment goes to the website owner and the remainder goes to the seller. For example:
Tom sells shirts at $20 each and i want to buy two, so i would pay $40 plus the 3% of the transaction, that would sum up to $41.2, $40 would go to Tom and $1.2 to the page owner.
How can i do this using Paypal? I have been reading a lot Smart Payments Button describes how to set a payment but the funds go to a single person, i need to set a chained payment, split payment or something alike and their docs seem very fuzzy.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks!
platform_fees , documented here , is the analogue to chained payments. However, it is only available to PayPal partners -- i.e., probably not your client.
For separate transaction payments to more than one receiver account, there is multi-seller payments.
After completing the Paypal Integration and after tears and pain i can tell that i couldn't use platform_fees.
The implementation is complete and working but i wrote to customer support and to dev support and they just don't want you to use platform_fees so nothing will work along that path.
The solution they provide and the one they want you to use is getting all the money on your account and then splitting it using Payouts to all the clients.
Really bad solution imo but its convenient for them because they charge more transactions instead of allowing you to do everything on a single transaction.
I have a client that wants a site that hosts sellers selling items and allows buyers to purchase the items. She wants all the money transactions to be between the buyer and seller and she collects a percentage of the sale. She wants her percentage to be automatically put in her paypal account. Kinda like eBay for example.
I have used paypal standard with buttons but have never done anything like this. Does anyone have any suggestions about how I would get started and/or how this is done?
Thank you for your suggestions,
Greg
Many people would (and probably will) recommend using some sort of split/chained payment solution, but I will just point out that the site you mention, eBay, does not use split payments. eBay sellers register with eBay; eBay faciliates the sales and bills the sellers for their fees. You can do the billing through invoicing, or via preapproved payment/billing agreements (which allow you to collect from sellers without them having to send you each payment).
While this solution requires you to do a little more work (tracking sales & billing) it is a lot more flexible.
I'm curious if there is a way to process/connect buyers and sellers on my asp.net site without the site having to charge the buyer and credit the seller. In other words, I don't want to touch the money, but I do want to integrate the process as much as possible on my site.
I guess what I'm asking is how do auction sites manage the transactions between buyer and seller? I really don't want my site to resort to emailing the buyer with the seller's contact information and saying .... "here's the sellers info. Good luck with that."
Ebay seems to allow a buyer to go to PayPal and pay the seller, but returns back to Ebay with payment confirmation. Even though the transaction is between Buyer and Seller, Ebay is able to retrieve some details about that transaction. Is this simply because Ebay owns PayPal, or can other sites do the same?
Your question is really about payment processing. You can look into Amazon or Paypal for available APIs beyond the normal buyer <-> seller flow.
e.g.
Amazon Flexible Payments
Paypal Adaptive Payments
Hth...
p.s. I removed the ASP.net tag since this really isn't ASP.Net specific.
Well I asked though the paypal site, but have got no answer. I got the famous email with "Your question has been received. To review the status of your ticket, click on the link below." with no link in it. So I'm hoping I can get an answer here.
This is what I sent them:
It appears you have multiple APIs available and I'm having a hard time figuring out what the each API is capable of doing exactly. I want to create a site that in short, brings buyers and seller together. Here is what I am looking for:
Buyer and Seller make an agreement through site.
Buyer sends money, seller is unable to touch it yet though. (Basically can paypal secure a payment?)
Seller gets notice of money sent and notice to ship product ship product.
Alternative paths for step 4:
Buyer gets product and there are no issues, the buyer confirms the transaction and payment is released to the seller and a set % is sent to me. (Can paypal split payments?)
Seller never ships product or problem arise in shipping that cannot be resolved, paypal returns money to buyer without penalty. (Can paypal return funds without penalty?)
Product arrives, but has issues. There will be set penalties for said issues. Penalities are returned to the buyer, then rest is sent to seller and set % sent to me. (can paypal enact a penalty?)
Any general information or answers to my specific questions would be greatly appreciated. thank you for your time.
For #2, since you're the service provider, you'll be liable for product delivery. Paypal won't do it for you.
An ideal workflow would be:
Your buyers pay you
You withold the payment
Buyer okays the shipment
You keep your cut and pay the rest to the seller
If you have to refund your buyer (order cancellation, or some other reason), you can use paypal's refund api
To summarize, paypal is just a payment processor and would ensure that payment reaches from endpoint A to endpoint B. How you use paypal for your particular use cases is totally upto you.
I'm mulling over using Paypal express as an option for a new ecommerce site. I've searched for an answer to this question but can't seem to find an answer. My question has to do with exactly how you would checkout using Paypal on Etsy, for example. Let's say the total sale price is $20, when the buyer is being redirected back to Etsy after logging on to Paypal so their information can be collected, at what point would Etsy collect their commission? Would Etsy just collect their commission and the remaining payment goes directly to the seller, without Etsy touching the seller's portion? For my site the $20 (for example), needs to go directly to the seller while at the same time my company collects our commission without any part of the sellers portion of the sale being in my Paypal Express account for any amount of time.
It depends on how they are processing payments. They could be using Express Checkout with Parallel payments. Basically when the DoExpressCheckoutPayment API call is executed the transaction would be split up into the different accounts.