Question

Am I mistaken in assuming that adaptive payments does not offer a similar capability for users to finalize the payment on my website? The way my website currently works is that ‘sellers’ put products for sale, and ‘buyers’ purchase the products using PayPal express. At the end of the week we pay all the sellers the revenue earned from providing their products for sale.

The problem
: In communication with Paypal over at x.com, they didn’t like how we had the payment scheme setup and strongly suggested we use their Adaptive Payments api with Chained Payments or Parallel Payments to simultaneously pay sellers instead of waiting for the end of the week and have fund aggregation.

Our biggest issue with the Adaptive Payments API is that there is a slight chance that a user will go onto PayPal, pay for their purchase, and than PayPal redirects them to my website via the return URL, and our servers may be too busy to respond. In that situation, a customer paid via PayPal, but as a consequence of our system being offline their transaction might not be recorded on our servers and we would end up not delivering the product.

I currently have PayPal express set up on my website; The flow is as follows:

1. Buyer goes in the product page, clicks to pay with paypal
2. Buyer is redirected to paypal to sign in
3. Buyer approves payment and is immediately taken back to my website.
4. On my website the buyer reviews the transaction and clicks ‘pay’ to
   finish the transaction

5. If my website can establish a connection with the SQL servers, and
   can successfully communicate with the paypal API, I make the call to
   finalize the transaction.

   I know of preapproved payments, but wouldn’t that involve the customer checking off in paypal that they ‘approve certain amount of money to be taken in a certain amount of time’ ? I don’t want to give our customers the feeling of lack of control over their financials. Also, would PayPal IPN be a serious option? I have read of users using IPN in conjunction with adaptive payments as users often close their window as soon as payment is processed.

Answer 1

You can use Paypal IPN as a reliable option. Take a look at this paragraph (from Paypal IPN Docs):

“The IPN message service does not assume that all messages will be
received by your listener in a timely manner. Because the internet is
not 100% reliable, messages can become lost or delayed. To handle the
possibility of transmission and receipt delays or failures, the IPN
message service implements a retry mechanism that resends messages at
various intervals until you acknowledge that the message has
successfully been received. Messages may be resent for up to four days
after the original message. “