Paypal Adaptive Payments- Parallel or Chained for

Question

I have a multi vendor market place website where people can buy and sell items

Once the buyer has paid for the item, the website owner (myself) will receive a percentage of that sale (15%) and the seller will receive the rest. I would need the 15% of the final sale price to go into my business account immediately after or when the sale is made.

I have a plugin for Paypal Adaptive Payments, I just need to get an APP ID, I'm in the process of applying for new app. I am confused whether I should be choosing the chained payments option or parallel payments.

At first I thought I would be chained payments as I 've read this online, but then I read through paypal that you can only have 1 primary receiver and 9 secondary receivers at the most.

This doesn't make sense as there will be many secondary receivers as there will be many sellers on the marketplace/ my website

so this has made me think I should be choosing parallel?

I am very confused and can't find a clear enough example or explanation for what type I should be using for a multi vendor market place where I would be receiving the 15% commission for each sale.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

Answer 1

First of all, let say you are selling an item called itemA of a price of $10. Then you as the website owner would like to have 15% of the payment, and the rest of the payment should goes to the seller.

Now for the above transaction, how many sellers are going to receive the remaining 85% of the payment? I would assume it would be only 1 seller selling that item right? Therefore by any sense, 85% of the $10 which is $8.50 would goes to the seller.

This doesn't make sense as there will be many secondary receivers as there will be many sellers on the marketplace/ my website

I understand your marketplace had a lots of sellers selling stuff and items. The thing is, this statement, is meant for 1 transaction, 1 API call:

Chained Payment can only have 1 primary receiver and 6 secondary receivers at the most.

If you are saying you have lots of seller, then that would means your website would have multiple transactions, multiple API calls, you can have all the seller as secondary receiver. As long as, in 1 API call, only 6 secondary receivers are allowed receiving the payment.

To decide between Chained or Parellel or not, should based on your business requirement, whether you should wait those sellers to successfully deliver the items to the buyers, once they did, you can release the payment to the seller (secondary receiver). This can be achievable by Chained Payment, whereby you choose when you want to release the payment to secondary receiver based on your own condition.

However, if the above is not needed. Parellel Payment will be option to go with.