So here's a situation that I found myself in recently, and I'm trying to figure out how to go about crafting it into a viable solution.
It started with a client who has a catering business. On the weekends, he likes to grill, and by "grill" I mean he goes from dusk till dawn grilling his culinary masterpieces. He spends half the day preparing sides, and by day's end he had over two dozen people drop by his business to pick up these meals. I eventually talked him into doing a website, where he promotes these grilling events 6 days in advance, and opens his site up for pre-orders. As people pre-order this food, he turns around and sends invoices to them, albeit manually, and so long as they get paid prior to when he goes to pick up the meat, all is well in the kingdom.
So enter the next client, who has a similar catering business in a completely separate area, who does a different style of cooking for 6 out of the 7 days of the week, who also promotes her food for pre-order, except her window is anywhere from 6 days to 24 hours. Now they see what this other client of mine does and loves it, except she doesn't want the hassle of creating all of these manual invoices (because her operation runs all week, so it's a time factor, basically).
My questions are: Isn't there a method by which I can use the PayPal API to 1) verify with an e-mail that a client has PayPal, 2) have them allow "my app" to have limited access to the user's data, 3) send an invoice to the client, via PayPal, and 4) receive notice that the invoice has been paid? I'm fairly certain that I've had other projects do #4 easily, but the rest is a bit hazy, because I realize it doesn't follow the usual method by which one collects payments online. Basically my clients want nothing to do with storing or being responsible for credit cards, just let PayPal take their fees, and they make the food.
