PayPal REST API - Taking payments on behalf of other people

Question

I have an online collection agency that will attempt to chase payment and then accept payment online to pay into my clients account.

So far I've implemented Stripe, Braintree and a few others. PayPal is the obvious big one that I'm missing.

Does anyone know if you can use the PayPal REST API (or any of their API's I guess) to do the following:

1) Display a payment page 2) Capture payment from someone with a PayPal account 3) Deposit the payment into someone elses PayPal account other than mine

I know I can do this using the IPN but it's a fair bit of manual work. For example I need the person I want to pay to set certain URL's in the callback and it's all a bit messy.

I looked into the OAuth which gives me an access token etc but that just seems to be able to access account info. I need to be able to tell PayPal to pay someones account when I successfully capture a payment.

I've just seen this: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/identity/log-in-with-paypal/

But looks like it just gives access to the user details. There is nowhere that I can see that I can use the access token gained here to request a payment. Has anyone done this? Again, PayPal's documentation isn't exactly clear.

Answer 1

Not clear what are you asking for, are you looking for a sort of referal program?

You can decide which paypal account will receive the money both with REST and Classic API. For example using ExpressCheckout you can specify the seller account that will receive the money.

without IPN you will miss all the stuff happening to the transaction, ie:

• payment with a different currency can result in a pending state (money conversion)
• dispute
• etc

A multiple receiver scenario could be implemented with adaptive payments: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/integration-guide/APIntro/

• "Parallel payments enable a sender to send a single payment to multiple receivers"
• "Chained payments enable a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver. The primary receiver keeps part of the payment and pays secondary receivers the remainder."