Payment System with Split Payments Possible?

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supermike
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Payment System with Split Payments Possible?

Post by supermike »

Is there a web payment system out there that lets me take a percentage cut on transactions if I set up my customer on their system? As I do PHP sites, using this kind of payment system would come in really handy, especially if it's somewhat affordable for my clients. (In other words, they don't like to see $50/mo. fees and would rather have things down to a percentage on each transaction.)
supermike
Forum Contributor
Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2006 8:30 pm
Location: Somewhere in the Desert, USA

Re: Payment System with Split Payments Possible?

Post by supermike »

Someone just told me on another site to look at page 89 of PayPal's Name-Value Pair API Guide, which I had never heard of until today. In there, there's an option called MassPay, and lets one specify multiple paypal recipients for a given transaction. But I don't know much more, and don't really know if he's answered my question properly or not yet.
supermike
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Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2006 8:30 pm
Location: Somewhere in the Desert, USA

Re: Payment System with Split Payments Possible?

Post by supermike »

Another person confirms this, but is a little less vague. Instead of using NVP API from PayPal (which I'm suspecting is now deprecated), I am to use IPN or PDT API and there's a MassPayment option in there. This clue comes from the bottom of this blog post:

http://www.coinbridge.com/blog/?p=29

There, it states:
Using mass payments, it would be easy to write a script that would instanly split a payment between multiple PayPal accounts. Here’s how it would work. A parent account would receive the initial payment and then instantly initiate a mass payment to one or more child accounts. Mass pay is the most affordable way to currently split payments using PayPal, but it’s still not cheap. The fees are paid by the sender of the payment which is contrary to way PayPal’s fees are typically calculated.
A little further down, a technician working at PayPal confirms this and says:
Great description of split payments. Using Mass Pay with Website Payments Pro (Direct Payment API and Express Checkout) would be pretty straight forward because both use SOAP-based Web Services. You might add that IPN or PDT would be needed for real time split payments using Website Payments Standard.
For most of us, we're probably using Website Payments Standard instead of the more expensive Website Payments Pro, so he suggests for us to look at the parameters for IPN and PDT regarding MassPay.
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