How do I check a persons email address to make sure they have a paypal account?

Question

I'm trying to advance my programming skills and as such I'm trying to create a website which integrates with paypal. I've established that I need to be using chained payments through the adaptive payments API.

But before I go about receiving and sending payments I want to make sure that any new user signing up to my website already has a paypal account. IE when they sign up to my website I'd like to first of all check that the email address they supplied me with is already linked to a valid paypal account.

I've never had to do this before so if someone could explain in very simple language how I might go about doing this I'd be really grateful.

I'm using the cakephp framework incase that makes any difference to the answer.

thanks

Answer 1

This may be what you're looking for: AddressVerify API

Confirms whether a postal address and postal code match those of the specified PayPal account holder.

After supplying an email address, PayPal will return with one of 3 responses for the email parameter: None , Confirmed , or Unconfirmed . If it is None , then the request value does not match any email address on file at PayPal.

Although this API requires both the email address and shipping/billing information, it can be solely used to verify the email address. By supplying invalid shipping/billing information, the API will still respond with whether the email matches any on file at PayPal , and also match whether your invalid shipping/billing information matches the information on file with the matched email address.

An expected PayPal response may reflect the above:

Array
(
    [CONFIRMATIONCODE] => Confirmed
    [STREETMATCH] => Unconfirmed
    [ZIPMATCH] => Unconfirmed
    [COUNTRYCODE] => US
    [TOKEN] => a134k1j34lk134gv13dshjg52b
)

CONFIRMATIONCODE will be your only concern when verifying a PayPal email address.

Please, check the above link for more information.

Answer 2

Setting up an IPN Listener is one way that's often used to verify most of the important information you're referring to. There's a decent tutorial that you can check out since paypal's example might not be enough on it's own.