Developer's Guide

Adaptive Payments Developer Guide August 7, 2012 19
Introducing Adaptive Payments
Simple, Parallel, and Chained Payments
For example, you might use this configuration in a sales commission application that transfers
funds owed for commissions from your account to the accounts of your sales force.
Simple, Parallel, and Chained Payments
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’s account and
deposits it in both your account and the secondary receivers’ accounts.
NOTE: Chained payments also include delayed chained payments, in which payments to
secondary receivers can be delayed for up to 90 days.