How does Etsy know when someone has paid with PayPal?

Question

How does Etsy (a website collective for sellers of creative products) know the payment was made through Paypal? Is it possible with PayPal Express Checkout to use my accounts API, but send the payment to another account, purely by specifying the accounts email?

When you buy something from Etsy, the payment goes straight to the seller. It appears Etsy use PayPal Express Checkout to achieve this, using its own API details (i am assuming). As soon as the payment is made, Etsy is aware of this. It removes the item from sale and sends you a confirmation email. How does Etsy do this when the payment goes directly to another account?

As far as i can tell, PayPal will only send the payment to the account for which the API is linked to. When you make the first call to setup the Express Checkout with Paypal, is there a way to pass through the email address of the account you actually want the payment to go to during this process? I cannot seem to find this field anywhere. Or maybe it is done in an entirely different way. Anyone have any ideas how this process actually works in Etsy ?

Notes: I know that when you setup a seller account in Etsy, you only have to give your paypal email address that you want the payments to go to, not give them any API access of any kind. I have tested this.

This is all in the context of setting up a website that essentially does the same thing, allowing a sellers to have their own mini shops on our site. The payment needs to go directly to the seller, and we need to confirm payment has been made by the buyer. I dont want the sellers to have to setup anything in the PayPal account or anything like that. So if you have any other ideas/suggestions how i can achieve this, I would love to hear them.

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:30

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it knows this because of the success callback url.

On how to get confirmation of a transaction between two other parties, look at this question

So I guess not with express checkout, but certainly with Instant Payment Notification.

The only way I can think of doing this with Express Checkout is if each receiving party has a separate merchant account. As one answer by netom in this question

edited May 23 '17 at 12:30

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answered Jun 28 '12 at 10:03

Kinjal Dixit

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Thank you for that ! That other question is what i am trying to achieve, but doesnt actaully solve the problem. Etsy manages to achieve my goal with Express Checkout. You click checkout, it takes you to paypal, you login to paypal and confirm payment, it then returns you to Etsy to do a final review of your order before you actaully approve it. If that isnt Express Checkout then what is it ? And how does it use its own API details to make a 3rd patty payment IPN doesnt solve the problem as it by istelf is not a solution - it is used along with one of the payment methods. – Jn Fity Jun 28 '12 at 12:33

score -1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

I don't believe Etsy uses Express Checkout, but rather, uses PayPal Adaptive Payments.
Using Adaptive Payments, you can change the receiver of the funds simply by specifying a different email address for the primary or secondary receiver.

See also my answer at Online payments for a middleman

As for the Etsy confirmation; since Etsy is the one making the API calls the PayPal - and only changing the receiver on a per-transaction basis - they can just specify an ipnNotificationUrl in order to be notified via PayPal IPN whenever a transaction completes.

How does Etsy know when someone has paid with PayPal?

2 Answers2