Developer's Guide

20 July 2011 PayPal Mobile Payments Developer Guide and Reference – Android OS Edition
Chained Payments
A chained payment is a payment from a sender that is indirectly parallel among multiple
receivers. It is an extension of a typical payment from a sender to a receiver; however, a receiver,
known as the primary receiver, passes part of the payment to other receivers, who are called
secondary receivers.
NOTE: Chained payments require a specific permission level on the part of the API caller and
merchant. For information, refer to the section "Adaptive Payments Permission Levels" in the
Adaptive Payments Developer Guide.
You can have at most one primary receiver and from 1 to 5 secondary receivers. Chained
payments are useful in cases when the primary receiver acts as an agent for other receivers. The
sender deals only with the primary receiver and does not know about the secondary receivers,
including how a payment is parallel among receivers. The following example shows a sender
making a payment of $100:
In this example, the primary receiver receives $100 from the sender‟s perspective; however, the
primary receiver actually receives only $10 and passes a total of $90 to secondary receivers
Receiver 2 and Receiver 3.
NOTE: The scenario above is an example only and does not take PayPal fees into account.