PayPal adaptive Payments chained payments won't let the primary receiver take less than the secondary receiver. Want this for refunds

Question

I am using Paypal adaptive payments chained payments for online digital goods purchases. I have used this api before with a primary and a secondary receiver where the secondary receiver is my company and receives a smaller share of the payment than the primary receiver.

For a separate Paypal application I want to use delayed chained payments with the money resting in my account for a couple of hours until I know no refunds are requested. (The nature of the digital goods places a limited time on refund requests.) I keep getting an error: 579017 The amount for the primary receiver must be greater than or equal to the total of other chained receiver amounts

My Question is Is there any way to allow the primary to receive less money than the secondaries? In the Paypal documentation they have this diagram in Chained payments which shows the primary getting less than the secondaries, but I cannot make this work in practice in the sandbox.

There is an image here showing the primary getting less than the secondaries PayPal documentation

Thanks in advance for your help!!

Answer 1

Sounds like you just have the amounts wrong. When working with chained payments the primary receiver amount should be the total amount of all payments. Then the secondary amounts would just be what they are supposed to get.

For example, say $100 was getting split between 3 people. You might set that up like this...

• Primary Receiver Amount = $100.00
• Secondary Receiver Amount = $50.00
• Secondary Receiver Amount = $30.00

What would happen here is the primary receiver would get the full $100, but when the secondary payments were triggered it would send those payments accordingly, which leaves the primary receiver with $20 while the secondary receivers got $50 and $30.

Make sense?