Is described scenario possible with paypal services (or other similiar sites)

Question

I would like to support payments in my web application which acts as proxy between group of customers and merchant. I'm still trying to research this, but I'm new to subject and a little confused. Maybe someone could point me to good direction.

Is below scenario possible with paypal services (or other similiar sites)?

1. Customer creates account and my application stores his billing data (credit card number) in 3rd party service, so I don't need PCI compliance certificate
2. Customer A, B and C are creating common group order from one of registered merchants. For example there are 3 products in this global order.
3. After some time one of customers accepts group order and application create 3 payments to merchant without needing confirmation from all customers

Those orders will be daily and payment will be delayed so that's why I don't want confirmation from users.

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I was reading on Paypal site about Adaptive Payments, but there is step "Redirect the Customer to PayPal for Authorization", so I assume it's not for me, because it needs confirmation. https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/ht_ap-basicChainedPayment-curl-etc/

I'm from Poland so Paypal Direct Credit Card Payments are not available for me. https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/direct/rest_api_payment_country_currency_support/#direct-credit-card-payments

I found REST operation - store a credit card so maybe one thing is easy :) https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#store-a-credit-card

Answer 1

Let me see if I can answer your questions (I'm with PayPal / Braintree), and I'm perfectly fine with you asking it here.

The short answer to your question is that yes, this is absolutely possible with PayPal services. Let's break down each part with some options:

Storing billing data

It looks like you already found the answer here - you can absolutely use the vault for storing that information (https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/direct/rest-vault-overview/).

Creating an order for later capturing & Capturing the payment

What I would look into here (to see if that works for your needs) is the auth-capture mechanism (auth: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/api/#authorizations and capture: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/api/#captures). Here's how it basically works: - You use authorize to hold funds in the buyer's account for a period of time.
- From the auth you will get a key back that will allow you to reference that authorization in the capture step - When you are ready to capture, you simply use the capture endpoint with that key, and you capture those funds.

There's also on other mechanism which you might want to check out - the orders endpoint adds more of a flow on top of auth / capture to allow you to have auth / capture more bound to a order processing - you can check out more on that here: https://devblog.paypal.com/rest-orders-api/

A few other notes. There are a whole series of products in the classic suite to also do 2) and 3). One of the best resources I like in the classic docs is the use case page at https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/use-cases/ - it tends to help guide you based on real world scenarios.

I hope that all helps, and I'd be happy to follow up with more specifics if there is something that I missed from your scenario.

Jonathan LeBlanc (@jcleblanc)