PayPal payments with both PayPal Accounts and Credit Cards on iOS as a third-party merchant

Question

I'm trying to add payments to an iOS App I'm developing, where some people sell physical goods, and other ones buy them, but I didn't find any solution that fits my needs.

Currently, I've added the PayPal MPL SDK, as described here.

However, the MPL library seems to not provide Credit Card support, furthermore its graphic is so outdated on iOS7.

Other options I found are:

• PayPal iOS SDK, but it's based on the REST API, while I need to support third-party payments and eventually chained/parallel payments, and all these features are not available with the REST API.

• PayPal MEC (Mobile Express Checkout), using it inside an UIWebView.

  Even if it does provide both Credit Card & PayPal Account as payment methods, I didn't find any way to support third-party payments (a.k.a. me/the app being the API Caller with another PayPal account being the Receiver).

  Furthermore, MEC does not support parallel payments, multiple receivers, etc., but for now this would not be a problem, If I only could use it with third-party payments.

• PayPal Adaptive Payments API, I even tried to use PayPal AP API without the SDK given by PayPal, obtaining the payKey server-side and loading https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ap-payment&paykey=AP-KEY inside an UIWebView by myself.

  However this page hasn't a mobile version, so it's simply unusable.

  I've tried even using the embedded webflow, the one with &extType=mini, but it looks awful. Just not designed for this.

In conclusion my question is:

How can I support both credit cards & paypal accounts payment methods, on mobile devices (iOS in this case), if I need to handle them as a third-party merchant?

Answer 1

According to PayPal's website regarding integration third-party support, parallel, and chained payments are not supported yet.

MPL libraries

PayPal is replacing the old Mobile Payments Libraries (MPL) with the new PayPal Android and iOS SDKs. The new Mobile SDKs use the PayPal REST API. The MPL uses the Adaptive Payments API (a PayPal Classic API).

The new SDKs currently do not support third-party, parallel, and chained payments. To incorporate these features into your mobile apps see the MPL on GitHub and MPL documentation. Issues related to MPL should be filed in the following repository: sdk-packages

For existing Express Checkout integrations, or additional features, we recommend Mobile Express Checkout.

However, one could accept/process credit cards with PayPal by using PayPalConfiguration.acceptCreditCards property.