Goal: Allow a user on my website to pay another user(merchant) for a service via either PayPal or Stripe. I would like to take a percentage of the purchase amount and the remaining percentage would go to the merchants account.
I've successfully added both Stripe and PayPal to my Django app, and successfully integrated a payment portal, but the default use-case appears to be for the user to send a payment to owner of the website (owner of the paypal/stripe account) via a client ID. For paypal, I figured out how to specify the payee as the merchant, rather than myself, but there is still not a clear way to split the payment. I would not like to accept 100% of the payment and then pay the merchant. The only payment I should receive is the percent of the payment at the time of the transaction..
Is it possible to implement this type of payment schema through Stripe Merchant onboarding? The only route to achieve this through paypal as far as I can tell is PayPal partnership (paypal marketplace), which is for larger businesses.
Split funds from a single charge between different sellers using Connect
Connect
Stripe does not support the splitting of funds from a single charge
among multiple sellers for compliance reasons. As a platform using
Connect, you will need to ensure that there is still a one-to-one
relationship between a charge and one of your connected accounts.
PayPal User Agreement
4.5 No Surcharges. You agree that you will not impose a surcharge or any other fee for accepting PayPal as a payment method. You may charge
a handling fee in connection with the sale of goods or services, as
long as the handling fee does not operate as a surcharge and is not
higher than the handling fee you charge for non-PayPal transactions.
You will have to be the middleman and take payment, split it and then send the rest to the paypal user or make two charges, 1. The cost 2. Your fee.
The only route to achieve this through PayPal as far as I can tell is PayPal partnership (paypal marketplace), which is for larger businesses.
That's correct. Without that type of partnership, you would need to accept the whole payment and use something like Payouts, which of obviously does not meet your requirement of only accepting some percent.
(There was a very old way to do it -- Adaptive Payments Chained Payments, but you can forget it ever existed; no longer ever available)
I suppose, technically, the deprecated EC Parallel Payments is still open and "usable", but that's an observable split and designed for use cases like paying for a Hotel and Airfaire at once. Really not good for marketplace use, and it's also quite old and may go away soon due to that deprecation. I would not recommend using it for anything, much less marketplaces -- just covering the bases.
Related
I have validated the credit card in Authorize.net using the authOnlyTransaction method. I have also the option of ACH validation but there are some problems in validating that may be because of lack of knowledge in payment domain.
I tried to use the authorize.net but i have to specify the amount first.
It does not validate all the credentials but only routing number and bank name
I have to wait 2-3 days for the verification from the bank regarding the payment.
Question is, is there any method which i can use to validate the ACH
on my webpage when user hit the verify button ? I have also tried to use the plaid but in the documentation it states that this also required some days to valid. Any kind of help would be much appreciated.
There is no way to get real time verification of a bank account through Authorize.Net. ACH works differently than credit cards and this is one of the limitations of it (the upside being lower cost associated with accepting ACH payments).
Plaid does offer account verification through an API which returns an immediate result. Plaid is not free, however.
If you provide a service or product and accept ACH payments, and don't want the risk associated waiting from verification that the account is valid or pay fees, then you should postpone allowing access to that service or shipping your good until payment clears. Otherwise, a service like Plaid is what you are looking for.
I am developing an online ticketing system for events (like concerts). A basic part is a seat chart where the visitors will be presented the available seats/tickets to choose from. Once they make a selection, the system immediately tries to reserve the tickets for 10 minutes (by entering the ticket IDs into a table where ticket ID is key).
Only if the reservation was succesful, a paypal button is presented to make the payment.
All this works fine. Ticket Reservation is not a problem for me. I can handle that in my system. But once paypal comes into the game, things get difficult.
The Problem:
If the user for some reason spends a lot of time in Paypal (more than 10 minutes), the ticket reservation on my website will expire, allowing the tickets to be bought by another visitor, which might happen before visitor 1 makes the payment. Visitor 1 does not see any of this because he is still in paypal... At some point in time, he will manage to make the payment (e.g. after 15 minutes), which will perfectly work because paypal does not know anything about expired reservations.
In the end, I might have two visitors having paid for the same ticket/seat!
How can I prevent that from happening?
How do you handle race conditions if two systems are involved and one of them is out of your control?
My thinking was: Actually a check should be made right before the payment takes place, but of course I don't have control about what happens in paypal!
I know I can use Paypal's IPN and such, but this only happens AFTER payment which is too late.
Alternatively, it would be great if paypal asked me through API to confirm a payment. Then I could say "no" in case the tickets have been sold to someone else. But I don't think this is possible with paypal.
I'd recommend using Express Checkout. Express Checkout allows you to control when the payment happens, because you'll fire off an API call to PayPal to actually process the payment.
The other possibility you can look into is using an authorization instead of a sale transaction. That way, if another buyer takes the seat, you can void the authorization, and the buyer won't get charged. (PayPal will probably charge you for the voided authorization, however.)
One solution as Matt Cole suggested is to use 'authorization' instead of 'sale'.
You can do this by setting 'intent' to 'authorize' instead of 'sale' ({intent: "authorize"}) in your calls to the Paypal API when you're creating a Paypal payment. Once the customer approves the transaction, it is up to you to authorize this transaction by capturing the payment.
I am trying to prototype a system that will display a list of choices to a user, and allow them to place an order for the one they select (an over simplification of the prototype, but sufficient to get to the point). I have the users credit card number, billing and shipping addresses, and other contact information, but I can't find any web services that will let me actually purchase something with this information to complete the prototype. I have checked directories such as Programmable Web and Xmethods, but they just seem to point to APIs that let you check for prices and availability, but not actually place an order. Does such a thing exist, or is there some reason (such as security) that I am missing, that prevents such a service from being offered?
The most important thing about online shopping is the security of transmitted information (e.g. credit card data). So the ideal case is to transmit these information directly to the related bank's (issuer of the credit card) payment services, rather than passing it via other service providers. This is what 3-D Secure does.
So when you use a common API this means putting an extra broker between, and passing the secure information to this party which increases vulnerability. Since such a broker cannot use 3-D secure (since it is not the merchant so not possible to make an agreement with the banks) and it should pass the information to online shopping site.
Moreover, an online shoping site can block traffic coming from such an intermediary webservice at any time if you do not make an obligatory agreement and making agreements for each online merchant is practically not very possible.
There is no such free API available the simple reason behind that information like credit card is very secure and confidential and there will security threat on free API's.
here is list of best 10 online payment system
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/online-payment-systems/
and this one who providing live demo
http://www.fastcharge.com/
I think it is possible though I don't know in depth information. I think this is what you see. In next steps you will be redirected to payment gateway of the bank and then you can complete the transactions just by answering some security questions. I think this is a service you should obtain from the bank. And I haven't seen any universal API that can perform the task you have mentioned.
Dialog GSM - Sri Lanka
Anything.lk - Sri Lanka
I've been tasked with setting up a society's website. I'm a full time Django (at al) web developer so I was happy to take on the task.
Going through the specs, they want to control memberships so that all applications need a "second" (read: sponsor, referee, etc) and then they need to pay a subscription fee to be part of the club.
This club has a number of events with variable ticket prices for lunches and talks to name two. Only members are allowed to see the price per ticket and therefore only members are allowed to buy the tickets.
I had originally planned on farming the event management off to EventBrite and pulling the upcoming events back to the website through EB's API but this members-only constraint looks like something EventBrite can't do.
Then there's processing members subscriptions. I had hoped to allow anybody to register a django.contrib.auth account but leave subscription payment offline but the client would be happier if they could mark accounts as "members", store the subscription data in the database and let the members pay online.
Like with EventBrite, I was hoping I could store rough membership data (whether or not they're allowed to subscribe, a unique token for the user on the API service, their level of membership and their membership's expiry) and there'd be something I could post users off to to process their subscription payment.
I basically don't want to touch any payment systems. Even something as simple as Paypal+IPN is something I'd rather not do (I can and have in the past on other projects) but it's the layer of management that I'd have to build around it (messaging members, creating recurring events, etc) that I'd like to farm out to a third party... Even if they do want an additional percent of the payments processed.
Do any of you know any suitable APIs that cover membership or events or both?
Or is this so complex that I should give up hoping for external help and just knuckle down and do it myself?
I think the google search you are looking for is online membership management. I don't know if any of them play particularly nicely with Django/python, but some of them do include APIs. Almost all of these are companies that charge, either for the system, or on a per-user basis.
If you don't mind installing something yourself, CiviCRM is a free, open source solution that I found with a bit of googling. It's integrates with either Joomla or Drupal (so probably PHP-based). You'd have to put the payment processing in yourself, but it does support payments using PayPal which would take handling payments mostly out of the equation. If you can, choose PayPal Express rather than PayPal Website Payments Pro since you may need to be PCI-DSS compliant to use the latter.
In developing a new web service I haven't been able to find very much information on how companies bill for their web services.
Do you bill by request or only certain requests ie) GET or POST?
-would these be tracked at the application or server level?
Do you bill by bandwidth?
-again how would this be tracked on a per user basis
Do you charge a subscription to simply have access?
-this is assuming that they are only granted an api key after payment has been made.
A combination of the above or other options?
Thanks for your help.
As all things in a market economy, the price, but also the inconvenience (or convenience) and risk associated with the actual payment (irrespective of the amount) is a function of how unique and cool and valued your service or product is.
It is therefore impossible to answer the question but in very generic terms, i.e. in the form of suggestions. You actual invoicing model may base on one or several of the following
bill for a one-time setup fee
bill on a subscription basis (i.e. for a defined period, with explicitly defined maximum amounts of usage)
bill for maintenance
bill by the act, i.e. a certain amount (possibly on a decreasing unit price schedule). Such acts should be counted at the server level, (The client-side may include some audit/monitoring/log of sorts, but the server-side should be the authoritative source of info)
bill by volume (for example number of MBytes transfered etc.), this is applicable to services where there is a big variation in the volume of info produced for each "act".
In general, the price and the modality of accounting should seem fair, to both parties, particularly to the buyer, and typically, the simpler the better. The price should not necessarily be low, provided you can make the case that the service provided is effectively valuable, and that you either invested and took risk to introduce the service, or the on-going expenses associated with running the service are evident.
I guess It Depends™ on what the service does. Broadly, I'd say you should bill when you provide some intrinsic value; how you determine what that billing criteria is is quite domain-specific. There may be some property of the service provided which allows you to determine how much to bill.
For example, suppose you've a web service that performs a calculation. You might decide that for every successful computation you do, you're going to charge a fixed fee, say $0.01, but let users off if there's a validation problem, such as an invalid request. Alternatively, if those computations are vaguely long-running, you might have a charging model that's based on some sort of CPU-time metric.
Your point about subscriptions is a good one, and this is an area where you might potentially benefit from allowing a couple of commercial models; one to cater for the users who might perform a lot of requests per month, in which case a fixed subscription might make sense, and one to cater for users who make a few ad-hoc requests. In the latter case, of course, if you only attract those customers, then you're not going to make a good return on investment. Some kind of middle ground, whereby you have a small subscription, but then allow customers to buy a "block" or "bundle" of requests on top without incurring additional processing costs, might work.
Most webservices I know of charge for two things:
Volume of "usage". Generally giving low volumes "free" access (i.e., less than X hits/hour from a given IP address account combination). This is similar to say, twitter which gives you 150 hits/hour to its service from either your username, or unique IP or combination of the two (so you dont abuse it by changing IPs frequently). If you want a higher volume you pay for that access and its usually assigned by account (in twitters case you can get a dev account [for free] which gives you 20K or more hits an hour)
Depth of Details, Access to features. Again free accounts get a minimum amount of access, but dont get access to more data or to more advanced features (filtering, etc). Lots of google services work like this, were base access is given to everyone but if you want more refined abilities (greater search, more data, faster results) you have to buy an account code with the corresponding functionality.
I havent really seen or participated in any projects with pay-for-performance, or pay-per-hit/access models as they get very difficult to reliably bill for and very hard to account for to customers, even if you use tiered or banded ranges. How do you tell your customers how many hits they have used, especially in a distributed system, with redundant fail-over, etc. If I had to pay $0.01 cents per access I would want to know exactly how its measured, and what the company had in place to control access, and how accurate their monitoring was, etc.
Its not impossible, and definitely can be done, and may work well in large bulk scenarios.
Many of the ones I have seen bill by time, such as on a monthly or yearly basis. Some allow you to pay by the month, some require some (or all) of the fee up front. Access might be restricted by issuing a security certificate for the web service that expires when the customer's account expires, or possibly by having them send a client ID and letting the server check if that client ID is allowed to have an answer (but that's open to people stealing someone else's client ID ;) ).
I suppose if you have a service that sends and receives very large amounts of data, it might make sense to bill per service request, but the billing for that could get trickier. Are clients likely to make dozens of requests per day, or just a few? How much to bill per transaction? $100? $0.01? That all would depend on the nature of the service. If you want to go that route, you would probably need to be able to ensure that clients only get billed for requests that are successfully answered (I'd hate to get billed even though my client app failed to receive the entire web service message from your server).
Per request or as a subscription, and yes, bandwidth can be a variable that is used to set the fee. Depends of the value of binding the customer close or having a myriad of loosely coupled customers using it. There is no correct answer to the question that fits all or even most cases.
If I look at the services I have made in the past, the subscription model would be the best model to use. Sometime a tick of $ per request seems like the best approach but I have never had a service configured that way yet.
I agree with what has been said by Rob and Des. One thing to remember is that a subscription is a really simple concept that everyone is used to and comfortable with (if you price it right). If you want to cover a wide audience look at how the payment providers do - they have slightly different methods of payment depending on how many transactions you do per year. There'll be a fixed subscription plus a per-transaction charge and they both vary with the number of transactions. This is the most flexible, but it depends if it makes sense for your business.