Scenario - Want to have a customer purchase a product on our site with the payment going directly to the vendor and at the same time trigger a payment from the vendor to us.
Can this be done with Dwolla?
Are you looking to take a percentage of the order, or just apply a fee on top of dwolla's fee? Also, what environment are you working in? i.e. Are you coding in php, ruby, etc, or using one of the simple links that Dwolla provides for non-coders?
Edit: You can do a fixed fee or a percentage for the facilitator fee. Here's a link to the api:
https://developers.dwolla.com/dev/pages/facilitator You can change that programmatically per transaction if you so desire according to the documentation.
If you are using Dwolla's non-coder links then I don't know.
Yes this can be done using the transactionSend() API call where your Dwolla account would send money to the vendor's Dwolla account. As stated above, you can take a facilitator fee from this transaction (facilitatorAmount is one of the transactionSend() options).
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First, notice I have read many post regarding this topic, but the info provided is not enough for me or is not accurate.
I´m developing a website with AngularJS and Ruby on Rails that offers different services. Users can subscribe to these services (one or many) and they get a Paypal Recurring Payment (through a profile) to pay these services (using merchant API). For a fixed amount the service is working ok for me.
The problem is, the amount can be different from one period to another, depending on the number of services the user is subscribed.
I have read Paypal docs, but It´s still not clear to me what is the right approach.
My approaches are:
Once a user subscribes a new service, I can remove the existing recurring payment profile (with fixed amount) and create a new one. This would be ok, but I have read I can´t delete a profile automatically from my application. I can only create. In order to delete an existing profile, I have to do it manually, by login in my business paypal account and delete it. If true, then this is not a solution for me, because I can´t do all flow automatically. However, this is quite strange for me. Is this true? If not, could you please let me know how to do it?
Although, I have not read deep on it, I read on a post I can use Reference transactions to implement this. Is this right?
UPDATE
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECReferenceTxns/#recurringreftxns
As far as I understood, Reference transactions let me vary the amount to get from the buyer when I run it, but the problem is that this operation does not executes recurring (managed by Paypal). I should keep the logic in order to execute it from my application. Right?
Any other approach or clarification is welcome.
UPDATE
My first approach is to create just one variable recurring payment with the amount of all services subscribed. But, maybe the solution is to create a recurring payment profile per each service?
1) This is true if you're using Standard Subscription buttons, but if you're working with the Recurring Payments API you can cancel the profile using ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatus.
2) Yes, with reference transactions you can charge any amount you need to at any time, but it would be left up to you to build your own recurring payments system, basically, utilizing reference transactions. You could have a script run each day that goes through all your accounts and processes due payments accordingly.
Another option would be to have your users create a Preapproval profile and then use the Pay API to process payments using the preapproval keys. This is very similar to reference transactions.
I have a client who recently changed the scope of a project I was building for them, to a marketplace.
Previously users had to pay a nominal fee to register for the site...I was handling credit card transactions using Active Merchant.
For the marketplace that they now want to build they want to build a simple escrow-type system...the payment to the seller gets released when the buyer receives the product.
This will be difficult for several reasons:
How will the system be able to determine when the item has been received? The receiver could simply lie about it. I know paypal does something similar, but they use the tracking number from the shipping company to determine this.
How do I go about depositing payments in the sellers account? It's easy to process the payment from the buyer, but how do I get this money to the seller?
For #2 I was thinking it might be possible to use some sort of paypal account to handle this...I haven't looked into any specifics yet. Any idea where to start?
Paypal may be able to handle #1 as well, if I am lucky.
Any suggestions?
We used PayPal Adaptive Payments for #2... still hunting for a solution to facilitate the transaction between User A and User B with the marketplace taking a %...
Would love to hear more answers!
In regards to #1 - I'd require some sort of signed receipt on delivery. That would depend on the value of the goods, at the lower range tracking receipt + some sort of reputation system to remove people who abuse the system has worked for me in the past.
In regards to #2, disbursements; I'd recommend you look at our product Balanced. It's built to solve exactly this problem so I think it's a good match.
Balanced will allow you to collect funds into an escrow account and then disburse the funds as a separate action which allows you to split the funds up or group them together as required. Payouts are done via next-day ACH (US only) but we're building out international support.
Balanced has an excellent ruby gem since you're building in Rails and there's an ActiveMerchant plugin if that's what you are/have integrated with.
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.
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
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
You can automatically charge transaction fees between the payer and payee if you use the Amazon Payment Service. It explicitly supports your business model.
We want to add billing capabilities to our rails-driven web application. I've come across two plugins that do that - Service Merchant (which is free) and SaaS Rails kit (which costs money).
Does someone have some experience with these plugins (or others with the same functionality)? which one would you recommend?
Thanks!
I looked at both of them and unfortunately neither met my needs.
You say that you want to "add billing capabilities" -- but how complex are your bills?
Subscriptions?
Multiple subscriptions possible per customer at same time?
Any variable monthly costs? (eg the customer pays every month, but the amount they pay varies depending on something.)
Any additional items that aren't monthly? (eg setup charge, consulting, etc)
Billing subscriptions in advance? (like the phone company bills monthly service.) Or billing in arrears? (Customer uses service, then you bill them.)
There are very expensive companies you can outsource this stuff to (~ $25K - $50K and up for initial setup). Eg www.zuora.com
Or you can roll your own and charge the credit card using ActiveMerchant. Be sure to store the credit card info at your card processor (eg Authorize.Net Customer Information Manager).
If you're venture backed, then consult your VC for ideas. It may be worthwhile for you to outsource the whole thing.
If you're a lean startup, use one of the low-end guys if you have a simple subscription model. If your billing is more complex than that, the right answer may be to roll your own.
Low end subscription billers: Chargify, recurly, Google for "subscription billing"
No experience with those plugins, but I highly recommend using chargify to do recurring subscription billing. You'll use their rest-based API to create 'subscriptions' and it handles all of the charges, emails, and canceling subscriptions for you.
You'll pay chargify per user on a monthly basis (but it's cheap), and you pay the credit card processor, but there's no setup fees to chargify to get started.
http://chargify.com/
I have a site where members write specialized articles. I'd like to allow my members the option of putting up a PayPal button to charge their readers for these articles.
Basically, I'd like to set it up so that a member can choose to charge for content or not. If they choose to charge for an article, then their reader must pay via PayPal before they can view the article.
What is the best way to do this?
Most PayPal website tutorials are geared towards how to integrate PayPal to sell items on one site and don't really cover how to allow a site's members to charge others.
I'd just like for members to use Website Payments Standard. I'd like to make it very simple for them to take payments. Just enter their PayPal email address into our admin console and our site will take care of everything else.
Do I need to have the member setup IPN to get this to work? Or can just adding their PayPal email be enough.
Anyhow, any tips or tutorials you could point to would be great. Also, I'm using rails if that makes a difference.
Thanks.
You touched on what my suggestion would be - have them specify their IPN URL to a resource on your site that would process the transaction and allow access to the article if appropriate.
Another option would be to process those payments yourself, then at the end of the month, say, use the Mass Pay feature to send money to all the authors. I'm not sure what your tax liability would be in this situation however - IANAL.