Which API should I use?

Question

I am new with paypal.

After searching for info it seems paypal has a lot of technologies, APIs etc to be consumed and I cannot choose to right one for my case

My business case:

Simple marketplace android application with 2 main actors:

Seller
Buyer

Actions:

When buyer want to buy something via marketplace -> he pays via own paypal account to seller (buyer can see paypal page and authorize payment)
Seller automatically send fee payment to marketplace's paypal account (seller does not need any time autorize payment to marketplace, it should be automatically after buyer send money to seller)

Thanks for every help!

Drew Angell Drew Angell · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-31T01:15:46

There are a number of ways to get that done depending on the experience you would like for all parties involved.

PayPal would recommend that you use the Adaptive Payments API for this because it's exactly the sort of thing they built it for. Specifically, you could setup a chained payment. That will automatically split the payment between the seller and the marketplace / app owner.

I personally don't like the Adaptive Payments checkout experience, so I prefer to build the same functionality with Express Checkout.

For this, though, you would need to have the sellers that sign up with your marketplace create a billing agreement with the app (marketplace) so that you can trigger payments on their behalf.

Then you would build a reference transaction payment to yourself from the seller account any time you need to. So this could be as each transaction happens, or you could tally up some number of transactions and only process the reference transaction payment to yourself when the total reaches some amount, or do it once per week / month, or whatever you want to do in that case.

Which API should I use?

2 Answers