Send money to any PayPal account and receive payment notification

Question

We are developing a website where people can use our tools to fundraise for their organization or cause. I was wondering if with paypal IPN I can send money directly to the person's PayPal account doing the fundraising.

For example. User John Doe signs up on our website Website.com. As part of the signup process John Doe enters his PayPal email address he accepts payments with.

He now has the page Website.com/JohnDoe to accept payments/donations from.

Using IPN & PayPal payments pro can I have the payment sent to his account directly and still have our IPN address (Example: Website.com/ipn) receive the payment notification and payment information?

Also does Paypal Payments pro work inside of IFrames. Let's say John Doe embeds his Website.com/JohnDoe into his own website JohnDoe.com. Or the other option is in a Facebook page custom tab.

If PayPal payments pro, or standard will not work for this will Adaptive Payments work? In adaptive payments does each person I'm sending money to have to signup for it?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes, collecting payments to various email addresses/accounts is very easy, and you can have a single IPN service to verify these transactions. See the docs at:

https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNIntro/

.... for how to set the IPN address per-transaction (overriding any setting your merchants may be using account-wide for other transactions.

iFrames are a problem; PayPal has historically not allowed this for security reasons; they didn't want the potential for snooping js in other frames on the page. However as the web frameworks for this have matured PayPal has opened up some in-page checkout options (e.g. lightbox checkouts). You should check the latest docs (or ask someone @ PayPal) which, if any, integration models/checkout experiences currently support running inside iFrames.

Adaptive payments is not very likely to be the product you want; you will want either an PayPal Pro/Express Checkout solution or something packaged in the newest Braintree SDKs.

And finally: yes, with a few exceptions that probably don't apply to your use case, PayPal pays out only to PayPal accounts. Thus every business or person would need to sign up for a PayPal account in which to receive PayPal payments. (Note that in some cases users can sign up after the payments arrive... payments to an unsubscribed email address will be held and that email address notified of the pending payment and asked to sign up & complete the transaction(s).)

Answer 2

Using IPN, it's possible to set the recipient's address and the notification_url dynamically (see https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNSetup/). So using this method it ought to be possible for a payment to 'John Doe' to be made at your site, and for the payment to be sent to 'John Doe', and for the IPN notification from Paypal to post to a listener script at a URL at your site.