Question

Is it possible to use the “old” (Payments Pro / Express Checkout) PayPal API to send money on someone’s behalf to a receiver or group of receivers? I realize this is possible with the Adaptive Payments Pay method, but it doesn’t seem to be possible with the other API.

Answer 1

Yes, Express Checkout supports this.

For only sending funds to multiple receivers with you as the sender
Though it’s only a parallel transaction, not chained, and it may be a little less polished than Adaptive Payments. But it most certainly works.

To send money to multiple receivers with an Express Checkout transaction, simply ensure you’re using PAYMENTREQUEST_* variables (e.g., PAYMENTREQUEST_0_AMT, instead of just ‘AMT’), and add ‘PAYMENTREQUEST_0_SELLERPAYPALACCOUNTID=[e-mail].

Then for the second receiver, use;

PAYMENTREQUEST_1_SELLERPAYPALACCOUNTID=[e-mail]
PAYMENTREQUEST_1_AMT=9.99

For the third;

PAYMENTREQUEST_2_SELLERPAYPALACCOUNTID=[e-mail]
PAYMENTREQUEST_2_AMT=9.99

And so and, and so forth. 🙂

For someone else to multiple receivers
Or if you don’t actually hold the funds and you’d wish to do it on behalf of someone else to multiple receivers, you would use the Permissions API to get permission from the sender to send money on their behalf, and the sender would then need to be approved for the MassPay API.
Given, this is not ideal as not everyone has access to the MassPay API. But it’s certainly possible.
If you want to test it out; MassPay is enabled by default on all Premier and Business accounts in the PayPal Sandbox.