I am currently building a hosted Billing CRM System in code ignitor. Dwolla's low fee structure is highly appealing to me as a business owner, and may appeal to my customers as well, but I can't find supporting api documentation to confirm that it can do what I want it to do. Does anybody have the expertise to answer the following for me?
My system has 3 distinct levels of user, Super Admin (me) Organization Admin (superadmin's customers and revenue source) and Organization Members (organization admin's member/customer base and revenue source) I am currently building out choices for merchant processing gateways for the the organization admins to choose from as their billing infrastructure at organization account setup. I have already built Authorize.net, paypal, and stripe. Each of those services offer an API driven way for me to allow customers to "store" a default payment method on file with my payment system, and to authorize my system to take automatic payments on their behalf from that method of payment based on the chron jobs and parameters we set up.
I would like to do the same for dwolla, can I leverage the dwolla API to allow my users to create and store a default payment instance, and generate an applicable payment token that my billing system can then use to process future variable payments without end dwolla user's continuing input?
You would need to code all of the logic into your web app, but it is definitely possible using Dwolla's REST API. You would need to store the users' authenticated API token, their PIN number, and the account ID that would be their default payment account - all of which you could identify when they authorize your app to use their Dwolla creds.
I would consider a serious review of your app's security if you are storing all the required info to create a transaction on someone else's behalf - as most of those other services handle that stuff for you.