Member Avatar for Ghost

Hi Everyone!

It's been a while since I've posted! Anyway, I'm building a website and I need one user to be able to pay another user, while a percentage of that money goes to me.

Here's an example:

Two Users:
User A
User B

User A pays User B $100 through my website.
User B receives $95, I receive $5 (as the website owner).

What's the best way to do this? I know I can take payments directly using PayPal's API, but I need to let users pay each other while I take a % of the transactions. Any advice?

Thanks is advanced!

Best,
Ghost

PS: My website is built all in PHP, so if the API is PHP-friendly, that would be great :)

Edited by Ghost because: n/a
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by chrishea
Member Avatar for chrishea

I read one Blog post that suggested Liberty Reserve. Their fee is only 1%. You may want to investigate them further. Their site has a chart that compares them with PayPal and a couple of other providers. There is info on their API (link from the main page). It looks as if you have to sign up first (as PayPal used to do) so that could be a problem. Depending on your user community, they may not have the same trust in any other processor than PayPal because they know the PayPal name but don't know the others.

I think that you would really want this to be a single transaction with payments going in two directions, one to you and one to User B. Otherwise, all the funds go to you first and you are effectively acting like a bank / payment processor and that might have legal implications. On the other hand, I'm not sure that it's possible to avoid that with PayPal or Liberty without making it two separate transactions (one for $5 and one for $95) that User A would then be required to process one at a time. Here is PayPal's answer to a similar question.

Edited by chrishea because: n/a
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