Chained Payments?

[Guitarist]

I'm trying to find out how set up "chained payments" on my website.

I currently sell a few PDF sheet music downloads on my site (Guitarist.com) and it works fine. These are "simple payments." The buyer pays with Paypal and the money goes right into my Paypal account. Simple. (I use PayLoadz for this.)

But now I have a new PDF sheet music file I want to sell on the website. It's a new guitar arrangement by a friend and I want to split the payments with him. But I want it to be a simple, easy thing. I just want the buyer to make a single payment, and I want half the money to go into my Paypal account and the other half to go into my friend's Paypal account. Simple.

Is there a easy way to do this? I have read something about using "chained Paypal payments" to accomplish this, but it sounds complicated and confusing, like I have to be some kind of programming wizard to do this. I don't know anything about "API development" anything liked that.

Any help is much appreciated!

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi Guitarist,

Welcome! 🙂

Chained payments are definitely possible and you are correct that using Chained Payments would require that you or a developer program a custom application to use those APIs.  If you just need that functionality for one product on your website, it may not be worth the time and cost to create a custom solution.  I supposed it would depend on your anticipated sales volume.  If you're interested in setting up Chained Payments, it's part of our Adaptive Payments solution. We also have a Getting Started Guide for developers.

If you're looking for a developer to help you implement this, check out our list of PayPal Certified Developers.

Hopefully more 3rd party shopping carts will implement Adaptive payments as an option or add-on to their products to make it easier to use without creating a custom solution.  I'm not aware of any shopping carts that support Adaptive Payments but there are many PayPal compatible shopping carts that may have a solution.

The only other option I can think of that would not involve any APIs is to manually send your friend his cut of the received funds at regular intervals using the Send Money tab on your PayPal account.

I hope this information helps to find a solution. 🙂

- Frank