Question

So for the project I’m working on the client wants payments to be made directly to the people who sell on the website through PayPal (we store the sellers paypal email in our database against the user)

Seemed easy to begin with – a link to the paypal _cart endpoint, pass the sellers paypal email in, with my return url, get the IPN notification and update the database so we know the payment was successful.

The problem is this is insecure, as anyone can can the IPN callback url on my site, so to combat that, you are meant to encrypt everything using certificates.

My problem is, the certificates are per Seller account – not per website, so I’d have to require my sellers to go through the certificate generation, upload the public key to paypal, and also upload the private key to my clients website.

Or am I doing something wrong? Is there a better solution than this? I understand its probably not normal functionality to send payments to many different paypal emails from one website checkout..

Thanks

Answer 1

Your usecase is exactly why PayPal currently offers Adaptive Chained / Parallel Payments, where you can be the API caller, but the recipient(s) can be completely different persons.
Additionally, using this setup would allow you to take a share of the final sale as well (e.g. set the recipient as the Primary Receiver for 90% and set yourself as the Secondary Receiver with a 10% cut of the sale).

Have a look at https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/products/adaptive-payments for more information.

Parallel payments

Chained payments

Also take a look at Introducing Adaptive Payments and my answer at Multiple PayPal Transactions at once