Paypal Adaptive Payments and Ebay giving at checkout

Dear Readers,

We are now half way May, and my new year's resolution to  raise funds for charity this year hasn't exactly kicked off yet.

If this is your first visit to this blog, my new year's resolution in January was to raise funds for charity on-line.

How you might say? Well, I love shoes, and my plan is to sell little leather babyshoes ( prewalkers with a suede sole) which will be designed by my husband, who is a graduate of NCAD .

The idea would be that - at checkout - 2 Euros of the selling price will go to charity, and the buyer can decide which charity gets the funds. This way I give the buyer choice who they wish to support and secondly ( which is equally important to me) I don't actually handle the charity donation, as it would go straight to the chosen charity.

So I have done some research, and very quickly I came across Paypal's adaptive payments.

I am sure most of you have heard about Paypal, and most of you would be familiar with simple payments as it's a single payment to a single receiver.(like when you buy on Ebay, and you pay with Paypal, it's just to one recipient, namely the seller)

My scenario is different, as I wanted to find a way that there would be 2 recipients, myself and the chosen charity. The example below would allow for multiple charities to benefit.

For now I will do just primary receive( being myself) and then receiver 2 being an Irish charity.

In the adaptive payments there two types, chained payments and parallel payments.

Both allow to send payments to multiple recipients, and depending on the requirements, either the payment goes directly from the payer to the various recipients ( parallel), or the payment goes to a primary recipient , who then redistribute it to a second /third recipient ( chained).

It's all getting pretty complicated at this stage, and I am not a programmer, so the likely hood I can implement  and integrate this in an ecommerce platform is pretty slim.... but then I found EZchain.

I have been playing with it for a while now, and it seems exactly what I am looking for.

I can create a button ( it's really an URL pointing to Paypal), specify the recipients, the % of the total amount or the exact amount I want each recipient to receive.  I have been testing it in Sandbox, and it's working fine, so now I need to submit the application  to www.x.com as to get an APP ID so I can turn my sandbox into live method..

I have been dealing with Nate Jensen from http://www.zerogravpro.com/  ( the creators of this app)and he's been extremely helpful. ( Thanks Nate!)

I have been testing it on a  Magento Go website , you can find my Ecommerce website here.

(Feel free to test, but remember it's in Sandbox, so it's only going to work if you are using a Paypal Sandbox email, it won't work if you are trying this with a live Paypal account as you'll get some error message at checkout) 

Also ,I haven't created that many buttons yet, so just use quantity 1 and choose the BeeforBattens Logo:) If you are not familiar with Paypal Sandbox, check out this kbase article on Magento Go.

I'll explain in my next post how I got it to work, as it's not quite a full integration, but it works, and that's what counts in my books!

I had really hoped I could sell on Ebay Ireland for charity , but unfortunately that's not going to happen any time soon, if ever it will. 

Currently Ebay has a feature for sellers in UK and the USA, whereby the seller ( non charity) can give a % or a certain amount  of the selling price to charity or offer the buyer of their product on Ebay the option to donate to their favourite charity at checkout.

The other feature is that charities in their own right in the UK and the USA, can sell on Ebay , and raise much needed funds. Unfortunately this option is not available to Irish seller or Irish charities.

Have a great evening and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions or suggestions!

My email is katleenworkinginireland@gmail.com

Thanks!

Katleen