Setting up PayPal to allow my site's members to charge others

Question

I have a site where members write specialized articles. I'd like to allow my members the option of putting up a PayPal button to charge their readers for these articles.

Basically, I'd like to set it up so that a member can choose to charge for content or not. If they choose to charge for an article, then their reader must pay via PayPal before they can view the article.

What is the best way to do this?

Most PayPal website tutorials are geared towards how to integrate PayPal to sell items on one site and don't really cover how to allow a site's members to charge others.

I'd just like for members to use Website Payments Standard. I'd like to make it very simple for them to take payments. Just enter their PayPal email address into our admin console and our site will take care of everything else.

Do I need to have the member setup IPN to get this to work? Or can just adding their PayPal email be enough.

Anyhow, any tips or tutorials you could point to would be great. Also, I'm using rails if that makes a difference.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You touched on what my suggestion would be - have them specify their IPN URL to a resource on your site that would process the transaction and allow access to the article if appropriate.

Another option would be to process those payments yourself, then at the end of the month, say, use the Mass Pay feature to send money to all the authors. I'm not sure what your tax liability would be in this situation however - IANAL.