How to implement payment to multiple suppliers

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to integrate a payment mechanism to my site. The scenario that I need is not trivial and can be explained by the following example:

1. User pays upfront for a subscription program (i.e. receiving Netflix). User is able to make changes to the subscription (i.e. change number of movies checked out each time from 4 to 2)
2. User is able to buy additional one time purchases via the provider's site (Netflix) supplied by 3rd parties. These items (i.e. popcorn, snacks) get billed to the same credit card as the subscription without having to go through the process of resubmitting the credit card information.

Of course, my site takes also a small fee for the transactions :-)

I was wondering if this is supported by PayPal, Google Checkout or someone else.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The Paypal api can handle all of those processes.

I seem to have dropped the ball on what kind of answer you wanted so I'll leave it at that.

If you have some feedback, more direct questions I will try to answer as much as I can

--

The money would best go through you first, unless somehow you can convince your customers its normal to bill them per item. Also if they pay by credit card you should only bill them once as you would incur fees on every payment. I don't know of anyway to bill once but distribute the payments.

As for the paypal docs..

Very good resource, there is also some sample code for most major web languages

Also this will get you started if you don't have a developer login

Their developer support is also pretty good. One thing a lot of people seem to screw up when starting out with the paypal api is not setting the latest version in the configs so don't forget to update that to the latest release. :)

Disclaimer.. Yea I know there is a lot of bad press about paypal and crazy stuff happening, but they do get the job done most of the time, its not my fault the customers love to use it.