PayPal APIs_ Up and Running_ A Developer's Guide - Michael Balderas [26]
Another advantage of Adaptive Payments is that you can be an application owner—for example, an online merchant who owns a website, a payment application provider for cell phones, or a widget developer of a payments widget on a social networking site—without assuming the responsibility of sending or receiving the transactions.
PayPal Adaptive Payments API Operations Overview
Adaptive Payments is made up of 10 key API operations, listed in Table 4-1.
Table 4-1. Adaptive Payments API operations
API operation Description
CancelPreapproval Cancels a preapproval
ConvertCurrency Obtains foreign exchange currency conversion rates for a list of amounts
ExecutePayment Executes a payment
GetPaymentOptions Obtains the settings specified with the SetPaymentOptions API operation
Pay Transfers fund from a sender’s (buyer’s) PayPal account to on or more receivers’ PayPal accounts (up to six recipients)
PaymentDetails Obtains information about a payment set up with the Pay API operation
Preapproval Sets up preapprovals, which is an approval to make future payments on the sender’s behalf
PreapprovalDetails Obtains information about a preapproval
Refund Refunds all or part of a payment
SetPaymentOptions Sets payment options
Adaptive Payments Permission Levels
PayPal’s Adaptive Payments adds an additional layer of security and permission levels over other API functionality. Most of the Adaptive Payments API operations are available to all API callers, but some of the higher-level features are limited to those with advanced permission levels.
A merchant using a third-party Adaptive Payments application, at minimum, must have the same permission level required for the Adaptive Payments APIs called by the application. If, for example, your application supports chained payments but the merchant using it has a standard permission level, chained payments will not work for that merchant. Table 4-2 outlines the current permission restrictions. This list is subject to change, and so I suggest referring to http://www.paypal.com or http://www.x.com for more information about current permission levels.
Note
If you are distributing an application based upon Adaptive Payments, I highly recommend putting the required permission levels in your application distribution notes.
Table 4-2. Adaptive Payments permission levels and allowed features
Standard permission level Advanced permission level
Simple and parallel payments with explicit approval
Get payment details
Refunds
Currency conversion
Chained payments
Payments with implicit approval
Preapprovals and preapproval cancellations
Get preapproval details
Pay request with CREATE action type
SetPaymentOptions API operation
GetPaymentOptions API operation
ExecutePayment API operation
Personal payments
Adaptive Payments Application Workflows
Adaptive Payments facilitates payments between a sender and one or more receivers of that payment. You as the application owner and your application are the caller of the Adaptive Payments API operations. The application owner must have a PayPal business-level account, but senders and receivers can have a PayPal account of any type. Given the complexity and power for Adaptive Payments, you can be both the application owner and the receiver of payments. Outlined in Figure 4-1, this is referred to as a simple payment, where a sender makes a payment to a single recipient. This type of payment is equivalent to what is done with Express Checkout.
Figure 4-1. Adaptive Payments owner as recipient workflow
The Adaptive Payments API allows you and your application to act as an intermediary that facilitates payments for others, without you being a recipient of the funds, as outlined in Figure 4-2. This is referred to as a parallel payment, in which the sender transmits a single payment to multiple recipients and