Deferred PayPal Payments with an Unknown Secondary Receiver

Question

Reading through PayPal API documents I don’t see a clear way to do this, but I don’t want to assume that this is impossible, because I don’t know how to do it.

Use case . I create a market for the client, which allows the consumer to purchase a product service, and then we will find a supplier to perform this service. (features not indicated for confidentiality and irrelevance)

Problem . At the time of purchase, the supplier is unknown, but we want to allow the payment when the consumer purchases the service (and initiates the payment after completion).

From PayPal Adaptive Payment API I can see that you can create a Delayed Chain Payment (which is great), but a secondary receiver must be declared at creation. This is not possible because we do not yet know who will fulfill the consumer request.

One of the naive decisions is that the consumer pays us directly, then we start a secondary transaction between us and the supplier. This is not very convenient, because it requires a double payment transaction.

Is there any other way to do this with PayPal? Is there another payment provider that might be better suited?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

The permission API should allow you to customize the payment on behalf of the buyer at a later time when all parties are known.

Answer 2

If the secondary receiver is unknown - perhaps the best way to do this is to obtain prior approval from the user and then use it to pay for the secondary receiver in the future. Here's how you can do it:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/adaptive-payments/ht_ap-basicPreapproval-curl-etc/