Paypal API - Can we transfer money to multiple accounts in a transaction?

Question

A proposed scenario is, assume the shopping cart site, where buyer has to pay for a product. The sold product costs will be transferred to the respective merchant. Here, the website owner has to be paid(commission) for the purchased product.

Is it possible in Paypal? Right now, I am using Paypal checkout. Your ideas/suggestions would be helpful. Please do it.

Answer 1

There are a number of ways you could set this up.

You could use the Adaptive Payments platform, specifically the Pay API, to create parallel or chained payments so that multiple receivers can receive money within the same transaction.

You can also do a parallel payment with Express Checkout, but you can't do a chained payment.

The main difference is that with parallel payments the buyer will see the split during checkout. With a chained payment you can hide that so they only see the primary receiver. Also, chained payments can be delayed so you can trigger the commission to be paid at a later time if necessary (for example, waiting for services to be completed.)

Another way you could do this is to use Payments Standard, Express Checkout, or Payments Pro, and let the payment go entirely to a single account. Then setup a Pay API request to submit payment to the secondary receiver, or use the MassPay API. This could be setup within an IPN solution so the entire thing is automated. In this case you'd basically be building what the adaptive payments platform does for you, but it would give you a little bit more freedom over everything in the application.