Adaptive Payments payment COMPLETED although actionType is CREATE

Question

Using the Adaptive Payments API I acquired a pay key using the API method Pay with these parameters:

actionType:                      CREATE
receiverList.rec         


        

Answer 1

We ended up just using the Preapproval API and calling Pay with that. In the response I got to my e-mail I was told:

"PayPal does not allow you to hold any amount of money in somebody else's PayPal account     and that is why we have Preapproval API."

I'm still not sure why Create appears to make the charge without requiring an ExecutePayment call, but for my workflow (which I hope is valuable to you), the Preapproval API is the way to go.

Answer 2

(I know it's been three years since this question was asked, but since another user referenced this question, I'll answer it anyway.)

In short, if you send the sender over to the PayPal website, and they approve the payment, the payment will complete immediately, regardless of what you set actionType to.

The purpose of setting actionType=CREATE is to give you a little bit of time to make additional API calls against the paykey before the payment completes. It's primarily useful when you're doing implicit payments -- e.g., those payments where the sender and the API caller are the same party (and you've set sender.useCredentials=true, set your email address in senderEmail, or set your secure merchant account ID in sender.accountId), or those payments where you're using a preapproval that the sender has previously approved. Since these types of payments would normally complete right away (if you set actionType=PAY), setting actionType=CREATE gives you a little bit of time to make other API calls against the payment (such as SetPaymentOptions) before the payment completes.

If you're doing an explicit payment (where the sender has to go to the PayPal website to approve the payment), however, you'd just make those additional calls before sending the user over to PayPal.