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I have a website where users can subscribe for 10USD per month to a monthly pack with digital goods. 90% from each subscription goes to the content owner; 10% from each subscription goes to the website owner (the amount is being split). I want to automate this process.

Need to mention that my website is built with Ruby on Rails 3. I already took a look at the gems like fnando/paypal-recurring, tc/paypal_adaptive, jpablobr/active_paypal_adaptive_payment but there's no one particular gem that could help me with my problem.

Any thoughts? Are there useful gems that can solve this problem? Or Web-services?

Update (June 5, 2012, 17:24):

I tried to solve the problem using Adaptive Payments but subscription time is limited to one year; On the other hand, Recurring Payments does not support splitting the amount.

Ivan
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2 Answers2

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PayPal Adaptive Chained and preapproved payments would have been one way. Another option is to create a normal PayPal recurring payment via Express Checkout Recurring Payments, and then use the MassPay API to send 90% to the content owner, and 10% to the website owner.
The only downside on this solution, is that they are 2 separate transactions, and you will pay fees 2 times.

Did you already check with PayPal whether they are willing to extend the 1-year term for preapproved payments?

Robert
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  • Hi Robert, thanks for your answer! I didn't even tried to contact Paypal, because I've read that it can take couple months before they answer. I'll take a look at the MassPay API, thanks! – Ivan Jun 09 '12 at 00:37
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Have you checked out Stripe?

They don't support subscription splitting but they do describe how to go about accepting payments like on a marketplace in their FAQ, see Does Stripe support businesses that accept payments on behalf of other users like marketplaces? on https://stripe.com/help/faq

That being said it seems the easiest route would be to take subscription payments and then write an admin portion of your app that takes 10% off the price and prints out checks from your business's bank account, and then send them out monthly.

Another ruby library you may want to checkout is ActiveMerchant. http://activemerchant.org.

Thomas V.
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  • Thanks for your answer. Unfortunately Stripe is still for US-bank account owners (or did I miss somtething?) and I'm in The Netherlands. I'll take a look at ActiveMerchant. – Ivan Jun 05 '12 at 17:15