Best way to split a payment using the Smart Payments Button

Question

I am setting up the Paypal integration for a Clients website. He has a page where users can buy stuff that others users sell and he wants the buyers to pay using Paypal, he also wants the payment to be charged a fee, so that a percentage of the payment goes to the website owner and the remainder goes to the seller. For example:

Tom sells shirts at $20 each and i want to buy two, so i would pay $40 plus the 3% of the transaction, that would sum up to $41.2, $40 would go to Tom and $1.2 to the page owner.

How can i do this using Paypal? I have been reading a lot Smart Payments Button describes how to set a payment but the funds go to a single person, i need to set a chained payment, split payment or something alike and their docs seem very fuzzy.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

After completing the Paypal Integration and after tears and pain i can tell that i couldn't use platform_fees. The implementation is complete and working but i wrote to customer support and to dev support and they just don't want you to use platform_fees so nothing will work along that path. The solution they provide and the one they want you to use is getting all the money on your account and then splitting it using Payouts to all the clients. Really bad solution imo but its convenient for them because they charge more transactions instead of allowing you to do everything on a single transaction.

Answer 2

platform_fees , documented here , is the analogue to chained payments. However, it is only available to PayPal partners -- i.e., probably not your client.

For separate transaction payments to more than one receiver account, there is multi-seller payments.