Can a PayPal transaction include a third party?

Question

The situation is as follows: there's a website that connects sellers and buyers, like Ebay.

Among other things the owner of the website needs to know the details of each transaction initialized from there. Essentially I am looking for a payment method that returns a digital receipt.

Is it possible to do something like that with PayPal?

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with PayPal. Your notification of this "market website" needs to be done in your own code.

So yes, it is possible.

Answer 2

Of course you can do it like this.

Couple of things that you will have to do:

1. Have sellers register their PayPal information with. Lets say in "sellers" table, with merchant email/ merchant id as primary key.
2. Sellers will have to setup IPN URL on their PayPal accounts. There url will have to point to the IPN handler that you will create
3. Handle the IPN, check this out http://boolcast.com/joomla/3-development/13-joomla-custom-paypal-ipn. I wrote that PayPal IPN handler for Joomla a while back, you can eaily modify it and use it for what you need (you will have to remove merchant info from config). Also here is a list of IPN vars that you will receive https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_admin_IPNReference
4. If IPN is good, While handling the IPN check the receiver_email and/or receiver_id to determine who is the seller. You can retrieve the seller information from "sellers" table by the email/merchange_id. At this point you can generate all kinds of notifications to seller/buyer/yourself/etc...

Things to note:

• You will not be able to use merchant ID if non primary PayPal user will be creating PayPal button.
• List of IPN variables will depend on the type of payment and how it is submitted
• ALWAYS use PayPal Sandbox