Getting started as developer

[alvaro-fc]

I'm a web developer based in Spain and I've been asked to integrate PenPal into a client's site. The site will gather sellers and buyers and my application needs to collect money from buyers and get it sent to sellers—and then, at a later step (which should be invisible to buyers) pay a percentage of the total amount to the site itself.

I'm still in the earliest phase of the integration, where I need to select which PayPal product I have to use. I've never used PayPal before and the information is overwhelming and often contradictory. To make it worse, my profile uses Spanish terms and most docs use English terms so I don't even know if they're talking about the same products.

I kind of reached the conclusion that I need to use something called "Adaptive Payments" and implement a service called "Chained Payment".

I've created a "Business" account and managed to obtain some API credentials. But when I write some code following PayPal APIs Getting Started Guide I always get the same result:

Authentication failed. API credentials are incorrect.

And it seems true: I've tried some other credentials I found in some code samples I downloaded from PayPal and they work fine with my code.

So my questions are:

1. Have I chosen the right product?
2. How do I obtain a valid account for development?

If this is not the right place to ask this kind of questions, please accept my excuses but I've been reading documentation for three days and I'm still as clueless as the first day.

[snowshoe]

You may want to visit the Developer's forum for info.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/paypal

For testing code and scripts, PayPal has a feature called the Sandbox:

https://developer.paypal.com/

It's a good place to work out the glitches and learn before going live.

[alvaro-fc]

Thank you for your answer, though I suppose it's a canned response:

1. Stack Overflow is not affiliated with PayPal and they normally dismiss questions that are not strictly related to code.
2. The "Authentication failed. API credentials are incorrect." error message is returned by https://svcs.sandbox.paypal.com/AdaptiveAccounts/CreateAccount

[snowshoe]

Most folks here are voluntees who own online businesses and have worked with PayPal for years.  It's clear you're not doing your homework.  FYI - Stack Overflow is the new platform for the Developer's Forum.

[alvaro-fc]

Don't worry, I will not annoy you any more with my foolish questions.

Just one last remark. For your interest, this statement we can read in the Community/ PayPal forums section at PayPal's developers site:

Ask our community

Visit StackOverflow to check out our PayPal forum.

... contains at least two errors:

• our
• forum

Linking to a third-party community-based knowledge base doesn't convert it in your forum.

[alvaro-fc]

I finally found the answer to my second question.

The API credentials you can find in your PayPal profile (apparently) cannot be used to develop stuff in the Sandbox. You need to log into PayPal Developer and create virtual test accounts. One of those virtual test users needs to be of Business type. Then, it'll be assigned some virtual test API credentials—those are the API credentials you need to use!

[alvaro-fc]

I think I found the answer to my first question. In a PDF I downloaded from somewhere I can't remember we can read the folowing:

Adaptive Payments provides several kinds of payment: simple, parallel, and chained payments. You create each kind of payment with the Pay API.

- Simple payments enable a sender to send a single payment to a single receiver. For example, your website can use an Adaptive Payments payment flow to transfer money resulting from a sale from your customer’s PayPal account to your own account. This is the traditional kind of payment.

- Parallel payments enable a sender to send a single payment to multiple receivers. For example, your application might be a shopping cart that enables a buyer to pay for items from several merchants with one payment. Your shopping cart allocates the payment to merchants that actually provided the items. PayPal then deducts money from the sender’s account and deposits it in the receivers’ accounts.

- Chained payments enable a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver. The primary receiver keeps part of the payment and pays secondary receivers the remainder. For example, your application could be an online travel agency that handles bookings for airfare, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The sender sees only you as the primary receiver. You allocate the payment for your commission and the actual cost of services provided by other receivers. PayPal then deducts money from the sender

So, in the technical part, Adaptive Payments appears to be what I need to implement.

(It's still possible that when we attempt to go live we discover that it isn't available for non-US users or we get some other surprise but there's no way say in advance.)