I'm looking for a way to let users on my website pay other users on my website for goods or services and for me to take a percentage of the transaction as well as store the transaction data in database.Is there currently a service out there that will let me do this? Is Paypal capable of this? I know I can receive payments from users and send payments to users, but I want a way to directly let users pay others directly or even pay me directly and then me automatically pay the user who should be receiving the money once the payment clears.This will be a US only website for now and I'm using PHP and MySql if that makes a difference.
How can I let users pay other users on my website?
php;paypal;ecommerce;payment gateway
If you're in the US you can rule out using a true merchant account for this. Accepting payments on the behalf of another business is called factoring*. Factoring is against the rules set forth by Visa and MasterCard (and I'm pretty sure Discover Card and American Express as well). If you are caught factoring your merchant account will be closed, any outstanding funds will be held for six months or more, and you will be put on the Match File which is a blacklist for merchant accounts. Once you are on it you can never get a true merchant account again.PayPal offers Adaptive Payments which allows a payment to be split among two or more users. The only drawback is if a user is in a country not supported by PayPal then this won't work for them. Since this will be a US only website that won't be an issue for you.If you choose to use PayPal's Adaptive Payments, you will need to do some coding on your end to manage how the payments are dispersed. But that would be true of any payment provider you choose for this task. I suspect they have sample code to get you started at their developer website.* I am the author of this content