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I have a requirement to receive, and in return make payments (essentially forward a portion of the payment received to another party).

It's common to receive payments. There are a plethora of services for that: CheddarGetter, PayPal, Chargify, etc...

What about the flip side? Is there a system where a site could receive payment from a member, then right afterward send a portion of that payment to another member?

If not... how is this done?

Thank you.

(PS, if it helps... I'm developing the site in ASP.NET MVC, C#, using RavenDB)

Raphaël Althaus
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Chaddeus
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1 Answers1

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PayPal, for example, let's you pay from your account automatically if you want to. I don't know about others.

Note that you probably don't want to perform the payment automatically right after you receive the money. It is a security risk waiting to happen. Instead, I would decouple the two. Receive the payment based on your user's input, but transfer the money out as part of a batch process that runs periodically, hopefully on an entirely different server.

That way, if someone compromises your webserver, they still can't get money out of your account. You also get more control over money going out.

Once the money is out of your account, it's out of your account and there's no getting it back. The only way to fix it if you need to give money back to someone, is to take money out of your own pocket. So practice proper procedures here.

zmbq
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  • Thanks... using paypal should free my site from the major security responsibilities right (I'd store no financial information, just their paypal info, and use API's to interact with PayPal)? You believe this scenario should be possible with PayPal? (1) member1 posts an ad, no payment happens yet (2) member2 accepts ad (3) member1 and member2 click "complete", payment from member1 to site occurs (4) at the end of the day, when payment processing occurs, member2 gets paid a portion of member1's payment, some held by site Are there flaws I'm overlooking? – Chaddeus Oct 09 '12 at 08:51
  • You don't store any financial information, but you still let PayPal take money out of your account. If you do that from your web-server, you're more vulnerable. – zmbq Oct 09 '12 at 09:23
  • Thanks... I was digging deeper into Paypal's documentation, how about using chained payments? https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_APIntro – Chaddeus Oct 09 '12 at 09:33
  • I don't know what that is. However, if PayPal guarantees that the only way you're going to take X dollars out of your account is if you get Y dollars (Y>X), I guess you're safe. PayPal is most likely more secure than anything you will ever develop on your own. Just make sure you configure it properly. – zmbq Oct 09 '12 at 09:58
  • Thanks. It appears that PayPal will coordinate the transaction end-to-end, leaving only the remaining balance in my paypal account. This would allow immediate receipt of payment, and payment to the second member. Seems like a perfect fit. Thanks for your help! – Chaddeus Oct 09 '12 at 12:02