What is the successor of Adaptive Payments?

[waldgeist]

We're a Germany-based startup and would like to setup a C2C sharing-economy business model that requires a simple split payment:

* user A pays money to user B for a service

* our platform gets a commission of x% on this

We would like to make payments as easy as possible for both sides, since both users are customers (hence C2C), not full-fledged businesses. The easiest way would be to transfer money from one paypal account to another, using just the e-mail address of both parties.

A couple of months ago, we thought that Adaptive Payments was a good choice for this. But when we started to implement it, we saw on the docs that it is deprecated now. But there is no hint about a successor product. We know that there is Braintree marketplace, but this is available in the US only. The only Braintree product available in Germany is v.zero, but that just seems to be a simple PayPal checkout button.

Is there any PayPal product available in the EU that allows split payments like Adaptive Payments did? Or do we have to switch to Stripe Connect or MangoPay for such business cases?

[MTS_Ciaran]

Hi,

So at the moment you can still request an application ID for adaptive Payments here https://www.paypal-apps.com/user/my-account/applications

The product is moving to limited release, but merchants using it will continue to be able to use it until there is a successor to the features Adaptive Payments offers. 

In terms of successors available for the different type of features we have:

- Parallel Payments = Express Checkout Parallel Payments

- Pay API - Payouts API

- Checkout - Express Checkout 

So my recommendation would be to request an application ID via the link above for your business model and work with Adaptive Payments. 

[waldgeist]

Thanks for your reply.

I just got a mail from PayPal support telling me that my account won't qualify as I do not have enough selling volume. Which is obvious, as I was just about to setup a business model for this 🙂

So I guess I will have to use Payouts instead. Problem is that, from a legal perspective, that's not really an alternative, because the money would be "parked" for a certain (short) timeframe on my account. This means that I would have to have a banking license, if I do my business in Germany. Real "split payments" would avoid this. The other option would be an escrow service, but that's not available from PayPal. What a pity. In fact, I only have the choice to operate in a "grey zone" or use MangoPay / Lemonway as true marketplace escrow providers.

I really can't understand why PayPal ditched Adaptive Payments without offering an alternative that is legally equivalent to split payments. 😕

[ssaltman]

Can you contact me?

sssaltman at pmfbeta.com. We are a US company doing the same thing and discovering the same issues.

[MTS_Ciaran]

@ssaltman - Can you tell me more about what type of payment flow you are trying to implement?

[ssaltman]

Exactly the same as the OP - the same functionality provided by paypal's adaptive payments - which is no longer supported.

[ssaltman]

And, just to clarify, we have an adaptive payments ID. We implemented it. It has no mobile UI and thus cannot be used in our app (which is mobile).  Directly talking with paypal revealed that there are no plans and no ability to implement mobile UI so we dropped it as unusable for our purposes and we have implemented a different solution.  But we would like something like adaptive payments with the ability to use a mobile UI.

[MTS_Ciaran]

You could use the REST API's. 

So REST payments API to recieve the money, then once you have it you can use the payouts API to distribute the money out to others. The REST EC flow has a mobile UI. 

[ssaltman]

That solution is one option and we have implemented as a test. However that incurs double fees on the money transfer.

[ssaltman]

Can you link to the REST APIs?  Perhaps we are using a different Paypal service than you are referring to.  The one we are using opens a mobile browser @paypal to complete the transaction.