PayPal Chained payments error 520009

Question

I am trying to setup a chained payment app, and got the application approved. I was hoping that like in parallel payments, chained payments can have users with or without a registered paypal account. But with email accounts that are not registered, the api returns an error code 520009 saying the account 'email@domain.com' is restricted. I did see the following link having the same issue.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10262241/903978

Though in their dev doc says anyone with an email can get paid/ notified (except the app owner who needs a verified account), It is throwing an error. I have posted a ticket to paypal/mts but have nt heard from them yet.

My app case is, 1. User gets paid eg $100. They are the primary recipient in chain. 2. application (secondary reciever) gets a cut of this payment. say $2.

Any one know if chained payments need primary as well as rest of the recipients to have valid paypal accounts and not just an email? Or is there something in the call that allows primary recipients with just an email address?

( I know that application owner needs a registered paypal account).

Thanks

Answer 1

Paypal/mts confirms that their documentation is incorrect. Chained payments require confirmed paypal accounts and not just an email ID. They said they will update the documentation.

Answer 2

I can confirm this also, Paypal Adaptive Payments with Chained Delayed payments does require the secondary receiver and the primary one to be verified, but there seems to be some confusion about 'confirmed' and 'verified'. When pressing PayPal on this we discovered the criteria differs (or so they told us at Eco Market) and that users sometimes have to have confirmed their email address (simply clicking the verification email they get sent), but sometimes also have to go a step further and verify their account (going through the other steps like bank account confirm). They told us is varies based on country sometimes but for security reasons didn't tell us much more on how they do this (not overly helpful).

What we do to handle this is catch the error and as a marketplace we automatically contact the customer/seller to inform them the order cannot be processed due to the sellers account not being verified.

Going a step further, you could also validate sellers (again in a marketplace model) accounts by using the exact same API to take a small payment from them (which could be refunded using the API), which would allow you to validate sellers to make sure that they had a verified account before signing up.

Hope it helps if anyone else has any experiences of this and how they handle it I'd love to hear.

Jason Dainter Eco Market

Answer 3

In my experience, in adaptive payments, (in particular chained payments) you need this environment:

a) the app holder/developer must have a registered and verified paypal business account (the premium account is ok too but not the personal)

b) the recipients must have a business account if the amount doesn't exceed the limits it is ok if it is not verified too but if the amount exceeds the limit you'll have a problem in the chain.

c) the sender must have a paypal account, a simple personal account will fit.

Sometimes (rarely) happens that one payment fails due to restrictions on the sender email. The most frequent case I saw this happens was when the sender made a preapproval with one e-mail and then, before the preapproval was payed, he/she changed the e-mail in his/her paypal account. Silly but paypal has no control on this environment.

Hope this is helpful for you.

Cheers, Fil. Genoa, Italy