Making PayPal Payments as a Credit Card Retention Function

Question

Dear stackoverflow element,

I am a developer who wants to implement an online payment service (this is my first experience with a custom payment service module) for one of our customers, and they suggested using PayPal.

The script that I have is as follows:

The website will offer users to create the projects that they need to finance, the project owner must indicate how much money he needs and the time needed to collect this fund: Example: User-1 creates a new project, Project-1 , he needs " $ 1000 " to complete his project, and the collection time for this fund is " 1 week ".

Now other users can help (support) this guy by donating money for their project in different sizes: "$ 1", "$ 10", "$ 100", etc.

What I need to implement using PayPal services is to keep money from “ Supporters ” in my accounts or anywhere, and after a period of 1 week I’ve finished collecting funds, the system will evaluate whether the target budget is reached or no, this means that if Project 1 has reached the level of $ 1000 or not.

If the fund was successful (it reached " $ 1000 "), the money will be deducted from the accounts of supporters (donors) and sent to the owner of the User-1 > project (there will be payment for PayPal and the system), but if the fund was failed, the money will not be deducted , and supporters (donors) will receive money back there (remove the deduction for this money).

Is this something PayPal can do? or should I explore a different approach?

I tried and looked through everything in PayPal documents and many articles, but all of them relate to direct payment and refund operations, this will cost system money, since PayPal will deduct the payment for payment and return.

I really appreciate any help on this.

Best wishes

Answer 1

PayPal supports the authorization feature. Basically, you accept Authorization from the user for the amount you need, like $ 10, $ 100, etc., As indicated above, and then you can charge the user later using authorization. You can authorize using your PayPal account as well as a credit card. A detailed entry is available here.

Using PayPal ExpressCheckout: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/ht_ec-singleAuthPayment-curl-etc/

Credit Card Usage and DirectPayment: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/paypal-payments-pro/integration-guide/authorizations/

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Authorization and capture can be useful here, but it seems like a project more suitable for Adaptive Payments . In particular, Preapproval and Pay , which are covered in chapters 8 and 6 respectively in this documentation in PDF format.

The Adaptive Payments platform opens PayPal in ways that authorization and capture do not and can be very useful in such projects.

Basically, it was the Amazon Flexible Payments platform PayPal version that was mentioned.

Answer 3

For crowdfunding as sites PayPal has this document