: How can I let users pay other users on my website? I'm looking for a way to let users on my website pay other users on my website for goods or services and for me to take a percentage

@Pope3001725

If you're in the US you can rule out using a true merchant account for this. Accepting payments on the behalf of another business is called factoring*. Factoring is against the rules set forth by Visa and MasterCard (and I'm pretty sure Discover Card and American Express as well). If you are caught factoring your merchant account will be closed, any outstanding funds will be held for six months or more, and you will be put on the Match File which is a blacklist for merchant accounts. Once you are on it you can never get a true merchant account again.

PayPal offers Adaptive Payments which allows a payment to be split among two or more users. The only drawback is if a user is in a country not supported by PayPal then this won't work for them. Since this will be a US only website that won't be an issue for you.

If you choose to use PayPal's Adaptive Payments, you will need to do some coding on your end to manage how the payments are dispersed. But that would be true of any payment provider you choose for this task. I suspect they have sample code to get you started at their developer website.

* I am the author of this content

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@Si4351233

If you use Paypal you can set the seller's e-mail address to the user you want to receive the money (he needs to have a Paypal account).

The other way is to act as a middle-man and send them a check or a Paypal transaction on-demand.

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@Bryan171

i did that before on a client website.

the idea is to create a virtual currency on your website.lets say that virtual currency will be credits.

users then can buy credits from you using PayPal and then use these credits to pay other users.

if a user want to exchange credits for real money. he can submit a ticket to you or fill a form that verifies his data and then convert the credit amount to real money and send him the payment through PayPal.

example:
= 1000 credits

-a developer sells a theme for 50k credit which equal to .
-the buying user pays you for the 50k credits + your percentage.
-the buying user use the credits to buy the theme.
-the developer sells you the credits for the money.

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