How to charge your own fees alongside Paypal? - php

Question

I've searched everywhere in order to find an answer but have not found one. All i know is that in order to do it you need paypal adaptive payments i think (if you know another way let me know)
What im trying to do is make it so that when a user purchases a product 15% goes to one paypal account and the rest goes to the authors paypal account but have done loads of searching and have found nothing
PayPalAP::setAuth('my_api_username', 'my_api_password', 'my_api_signature');
// I'm not passing in an environment, which will default it to sandbox mode.
$options = array(
'cancelUrl' => 'http://my_cancel_url',
'returnUrl' => 'http://my_return_url',
'currencyCode' => 'USD',
'receiverEmailArray' => array('receiver_of_funds'),
'receiverAmountArray' => array('15'),
'ipnNotificationUrl' => 'http://my_ipn_listener_url'
);
$respo

Answer 1

Adaptive Payments would be the way with paypal ... But I would recommend using stripe for this kind of transaction. The API allows better control and was build for this kind of complexity. If you can replace paypal with stripe, do it. If not, you will need to contact paypal. They made this feature restricted.

Answer 2

Patrick Simard is correct that this feature is now restricted, but assuming you have received authorization from PayPal to use the adaptive API, then you have two option:
Chained Payments
Parallel Payments
Both will achieve the same end game, but which one you choose is ultimately up to you.
Chained Payments
With Chained Payments, you set up a payment option where the initial payment goes into one account, a portion is removed/left in that account, and then the rest is sent on to a second account.
Parallel Payments
Parallel Payments will produce a similar result, but rather than all of the funds being sent to one account first before being sent onwards, the money is instead sent to two different accounts immediately. (This option actually supports up to 6 accounts being paid at once.)
Examples of the HTTP I/O can be found on the linked documentation pages. You will simply need to set up cURL requests to create these. (Which should be a fairly straight forward process.)
To reiterate, though, heed the following notice from PayPal about using this API:
Important: Adaptive Payments is now a limited release product. It is restricted to select partners for approved use cases and should not be used for new integrations without guidance from PayPal.
This warning can be found at the top of documentation pages for Adaptive Pay.
Edit: In response to your comment, I have located a possible alternative that does not rely on the Adaptive Payments API, and seemingly does not require special permission from PayPal to use.
The option I found is to use Express Checkout with Parallel Payments. This utilizes the PayPal Name-Value Pair (NVP) and SOAP API. Some details on this option can found on this documentation page: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECParallelPayments/
As a caution, though, that page seems to indicate that the NVP and SOAP API is deprecated. I am unsure what they are replacing it with, but at this time, it does still appear to be an opportunity, although you may have to update your code at some point when they release their replacement for NVP & SOAP and/or when they remove NVP & SOAP.
There is also a full list of SDKs, which includes an Express Checkout SDK written in PHP for the NVP & SOAP API: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/nvpsoap-sdks/