Im setting up a online auction website similar to ebay but its for sports cards.... im no developer and that's for sure but I did hire one.. He is having trouble finding a solution to refunding transactions done thru paypal thru my site.. With that being said heres the skinny.. If a buyer pays a seller just like within ebay.. and a seller has to refund that transaction there is no paypal api for multiple/individual transcations between users on a site.. Only thru a merchant account.. so pretty much every user would have to set up a merchant account on paypal and then enter in there own api keys.. This solution is obviously not a good one and impractical.. The second solution that we had come up with was a simple redirect but it looks so NOT PRO.. The third solution was having the seller eat the transaction fee costs.. and again this is awful.. Please if anybody has any ideas or API's geared for this sort of thing.. My site is done completely in PHP and I would really appreciate help or any feedback or solutions anybody might have. Thanks
hmmm... you are a developper but don't know how to integrate Paypal? Strange, I would look after someone who knows his skils!
I haven't messed with it in awhile. Do any of the API's allow you to facilitate a payment so that the buyer pays the seller directly based on their email? As far as the ebay checkout, a seller puts the paypal email in their account or an auction, and the buyer is redirected to paypal to complete the payment. There's got to be a way to do this and just specify a return url. As far as I know, it's not required for a seller to put any API credentials in ebay, so the mechanism is already built in somewhere. If you have a paypal account, you might try contacting them and ask if they can point you to the best way of doing this. What they don't want you to do is take payment for a seller and take your own percentage and then remit the rest of the payment. It doesn't sound like this is your plan, but don't do this if that was intended.