If you’ve been taking the chapter-by-chapter approach to this book, you’ve now learned how to implement a traditional Express Checkout payment flow as well as an Express Checkout for Digital Goods payment flow. Make no mistake that these two payment flows are great ways to implement a checkout and provide a first-class payment experience that your customers will recognize and appreciate as they make online purchases on your site. Historically, Express Checkout has been the online payment experience that most consumers have expected, and the enhancements that have enabled seamless mobile experiences and in-context payment flows for digital goods scenarios have been crucial. However, the enhancements to Express Checkout have been evolutionary steps forward and offer fairly narrow possibilities in comparison to what the Adaptive Payments product offers.
PayPal’s official documentation on Adaptive Payments is available online: Adaptive Payments Developer Guide.
In comparison to Express Checkout, Website Payments Pro, and other disparate PayPal products that you may have considered as part of a checkout flow in which there is a single buyer and single seller, Adaptive Payments provides a single comprehensive framework for third parties (who are often neither the buyer nor the seller) to build payment processing systems of just about any variety you can imagine—including transactions that involve multiple recipients. For example, in addition to implementing a simple payment in which a single sender sends money to a single receiver, Adaptive Payments trivially allows you to use the very same API to move money from one sender to multiple receivers using what are called chained payments and parallel payments. Handling payment preapprovals, refunds, currency conversions, and other advanced scenarios are also possible through the same flexible fabric exposed through the Adaptive Payments APIs.
Excited? The remainder of this chapter provides some of the fundamentals and then transitions into an exercise in which we’ll augment Tweet Relevance to take advantage of Adaptive Payments.