Check for sufficient funds before Payment (Paypal Adaptive Payments)

Question

We are using the Paypal Adaptive Payments with their classic APIs.

We use the PreApproval API to set up pre-approvals (we get pre-approval key) for specific amounts for people in a group, and then later, when everyone in the group has set up their pre-approval, we call the Pay API and pass the pre-approval keys to finalize the transactions.

We want to treat these transactions (with multiple people) as an atomic transaction. If one of them fails (because of insufficient balance in one person's paypal account), we do not want to execute other payments.

Right now, when we pass the preapproval key to Pay API operation, only then do we know whether a payment has completed or there's an error.

So, my question is whether their is a way to check if a particular payment is possible before executing it? (We do not want refunds)

Thanks

Answer 1

as the preapproval only contains the buyers consent to perform a given transaction, there is no communication with the buyers bank when the preapproval is created. As far as I am aware, there is no way to foresee a funding error (or other errors for that matter).

As per https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/lifecycle/crowdfunding/

"Important: PayPal's preapproval payment billing agreement does not guarantee the availability of funds. This can result in the total collected amount to be less than total of the pledged amounts."

If we're assuming a crowd funding platform, you'd have to initiate refunds if the funding goal has not been reached - which is rather unlikely, if you stick to the best practices -

e.g. "Set limits on the maximum amount per contribution, per fundraising campaign, as well as the amount that a single person can contribute."