Developer's Guide

Table Of Contents
Adaptive Accounts Developer Guide May 2012 11
1
Introducing Adaptive Accounts
The Adaptive Accounts API lets you build applications that create PayPal accounts and handle
account management.
Adaptive Accounts Scenarios
The Adaptive Accounts API enables your application to create and verify PayPal accounts.
You can also add bank accounts to link to PayPal accounts as funding sources.
Consider the following examples. You might create a PayPal account using the Adaptive
Accounts APIs as part of the set up for a:
marketplace. You can offer PayPal as a payment option and create PayPal accounts for
your users that do not already have them. Your users can include buyers and suppliers or
clients and services providers as senders and receivers in various countries.
social networking application, such as one that “pays for lunch” or sends a payment for any
reason. Your application may not be directly involved in the payment; however, you can
enable the payment by ensuring that the user has the opportunity to create a PayPal
account.
enterprise application, such as a payroll application for small-to-medium sized businesses.
You can create PayPal accounts for each employee that does not have one and pay all
employees using PayPal’s Mass Pay or Adaptive Payments capabilities.
store checkout flow. You might provide PayPal account creation for your customers or you
might provide account creation for someone elses customers as part of a shopping cart
service.
Creating an Account
PayPal account holders traditionally create their PayPal accounts by going directly to
PayPal.com or signing up during a checkout flow. The Adaptive Accounts CreateAccount
method offers a new way: Creating accounts within your application or website, outside the
checkout flow.
Your application sends a request using the CreateAccount method with information
gathered from your website, and PayPal creates the account. At this point, the new PayPal
account holder is briefly redirected to PayPal.com to enter private information, such as a
password, and to accept the PayPal User Agreement. PayPal then returns the new account