How to request from and send payment by merchant using PayPal (Adaptive Payment?)

Question

We have a website developed using Rails (and we use Active Merchant to take payment from users).

Now we have a new requirement: to allow our users to request money from us and for us to send the money to them by PayPal automatically.

Of course, we'll implement some business logic to ensure that only certain users are allowed to do this.

But the interface should be pretty simple. A logged-in user enters a PayPal account email address and the amount (including currency) he wants from us. Then we'll send the money to him by PayPal.

We don't need to verify that the user-entered email address is associated with an existing PayPal account, because the person receiving the email will be prompted to create an account to receive the money on PayPal.

I've looked at PayPal Adaptive Payment and Mass Payment. Our requirement is pretty simple and we don't need features like sending money to multiple recipients, chained payment, etc.

Our main requirement is that this is done automatically. In other words, we don't want to have to manually enter our PayPal account password every time someone requests money from us. Is this possible?

Which PayPal API is best suited for our requirement?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I really think Mass Pay is your best bet. Its going to allow you to automatically send money and would decrease the amount of fees you pay (the fees are a percentage of the money being sent, but its capped at $1 per recipient).

Adaptive Payments would be another solution, but the fees are higher.