views:

32

answers:

0

The Imaginary Scenario:

The Affiliates earn money on my website by selling items/services/widgets to their clients. You can think of it as a simple affiliate program. This money is stored in a single account until the Affiliate requests their money.

The Affiliates don't want to wait for a check to come in the mail; they want to log-on to their administration section (on my site) and click the magical "Transfer My Hard-Earned Money Now! Fool" button and have their millions deposited directly to their bank account (this transfer might take "3-4 days" if it has to --- the Affiliates just want to feel like they can always take control over their money).

Now, PayPal already does the "Send My Hard-Earned Money Now! Fool." function just fine. Their API even allows transferring money from one Paypal account to another; it just doesn't allow deposits to bank accounts. The Affiliates are lazy and don't want to log-in to their Paypal account to transfer their money.


So, what can a developer do?

  • I don't want to bother with Storing Credit Card information (PCI compliance...no thank you).
  • I don't really care to integrate directly with a bank
  • I want to (in psudeo code):

.

// affiliate and crdentials are pulled from my database.
Affiliate affiliate = db.Affiliates.GetByID(123456);
Credentials creds = affiliate.GetBankCredentials();
// paymentAPI is, well, its an API.
Xml response = paymentAPI.InitiateMoneyTransfer({from: myAccountCrdentials, to: creds, amount: 123, currency: "USD"});
if(response.success){
    print "Bling Bling! Transfer initiated";
}
else{
    print response.msg;
}

p.s. I'm in the USA