How to move money with Paypal from user to client as 3rd party?

Question

Actually we have clients that offer a service for users. Some of them charge money for their services.

We want to integrate Paypal, so that the users can buy the service from the customer and the money lands on the customers (merchant) Paypal account - so that we, as the platform owner, do not need to touch the money.

Since we have for all other payments a payment provider (which does not support Paypal), we need our own solution for this.

I just found Paypal's Adaptive Payments - but this looks like a big implementation.

I thought more about a solution where our clients can look into their Paypal account, give us an ID and we implement for them the "Express Checkout" for their product.

Is this the only solution or is there a better product from Paypal?

Answer 1

Paypal offers Instant Payment Notification (IPN). Their IPN listener service had code that seemed archaic, but they seem to have updated the code recently.

You can tell Paypal to send a form post to a URL on your server that includes the client's information as well as the purchase they made. You then send Paypal a 200 status header to notify them that you received the message. The script on your site then either emails you the information that Paypal sent, or you can write the information to your site in PHP.

With some modifications you can email yourself and the client the information so that both of you can track purchases. You should also be able to allow your clients to accept Paypal IPN so that you don't have to touch the money, or you can be the escrow by having the customer send you the funds, and then you send the funds to the client. With Paypal IPN the logging of all this data becomes automatic and takes the manual processing out of the workload.

Here is some information on Paypal IPN:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNIntro/ https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/products/instant-payment-notification/ https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/what-is-instant-payment-notification-(ipn)-faq2933 https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNSetup/