Processing third party payments (using PayPal) while taking a percentage

Question

I know it's possible to sit between a payer and payee using PayPal by just storing payee's PayPal account information.

Is it possible to take a percentage of the that transaction and pay it to a different PayPal account. Basically acting as a service fee for using our website?

If it helps, I would probably be using Active Merchant for rails.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is called "Chained Payments". You can take a commission from a payment, and the remainder can be split with one or more payees. The original payer only sees you. Chained payments are one of the several types of workflows you can get through the "Adaptive Payments" API.

More info on:

https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/integration-guide/APIntro/

and pages 18 and 19 of the following manual on Adaotive Payments manual at cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/PP_AdaptivePayments.pdf

Answer 2

I was looking into this very same scenario, and I believe I've found that it is supported via PayPal's Website Payment Pro API. It appears as though there are several available use cases, such as:

• Taking a cut, as you described
• Dividing up a single customer payment among multiple payees (so if you have a shopping car where you resell items from several different providers, you can divide the payments up based on who provided each item)

Take a look at the document here and see if it fits your needs. I'd be very curious to hear how your integration goes, since I'm looking at something very similar for my forthcoming site.

https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1328

EDIT: You should also take a look at the Adaptive Payments API. That was the other service I found that may fit this use case...

https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments

Answer 3

You can automatically charge transaction fees between the payer and payee if you use the Amazon Payment Service. It explicitly supports your business model.