Best Practices to get a Paypal Adaptive Payments account approved Fast !

Note- You can no longer sign up for PayPal adaptive. It will work only if you have an existing approved app.

With almost all of our E Commerce extensions adding support for Paypal Adaptive payments, we have been getting a lot of emails & support requests to help setup the Paypal application for the same.

Though its not possible to have exhaustive generalized instructions as to what to fill in to get your app approved fast, there are several areas that can be addressed. In order to get the best possible information, we created our own 'Live apps' & went through paypal's approval process & here are the results. 

Depending on what you are using Adaptive payments with, the approval time & conditions will differ a bit. As of now , the following of our applications offer Adaptive Payments support. 

• jGive
• Quick2Cart 
• jTicketing (Coming soon) 

Paypal might be a more stringent & inquisitive for the case of jGive since it deals with donations & investments as that area usually has much more regulation than other areas in most countries.

Note that in this specific case, i am using the example of JTicketing as the use case primarily but i will also give pointers about Quick2Cart & jGive use cases. 

Lets get started on how to go about setting up a Paypal Application & get an approval as fast as possible !

To create the application, you need to go to https://apps.paypal.com & login with your production account. Next Click on "New App" & then follow the steps as below. 

A. The App Information Section. 

Here, you need to enter basic information like the Title, Platform & Description of your application & how it will work with Paypal API features. Here, the title could be the name of your website. The Platform will be Web. The Description needs to detail out what your app will do. Incase of JTicketing, you will see that we have explained that we will build a site that allows Event Owners to sell tickets online & end users to buy them. The Site admin will take a commission on each sale. You can tweak this a bit to suit your site & maybe also give a short description of your specific business model based on this. 

B. Industry & Use Cases

Here Paypal needs more information from your about your business & Industry & more importantly your use case. Incase of JTicketing, we set this to event registration. There are plenty more options available in this list . Choose the best one suited to your application. This selection is critical as it looks like Paypal has standard policies & next steps for review based on what you choose here. I have emboldened ones that might make sense for our use cases of JTicketing, JGive & Quick2Cart below

• Analytics & Tools
• B2B
• Crowdsourcing/Disbursements
• Digital Goods
• Event Registration
• Financial Services
• Fundraising/Charitable donations (501c3)
• Marketplace
• Off-web/POS/Hardware device
• Personal Payments
• Services
• Storefront 

C. Services Used by the App

Currentlywe use Chained payments. This is useful when you don't want the details of how the payment is split to be known to the receivers. In the ideal scenario, this is the case. We are also introducing an option to used Parallel Payments in later releases where approval is fasterbut the transaction details of the split are known to recipients. Please fill out this area as shown in the screenshot below. Under the Chained payments section, select Instant & under who pays the fee( note that this is the paypal fee), set this to 'Primary Receiver'  . 

Fill in the Acceptable Use Policy & Funding approval section as best suits your need. 

D. Other settings

You can leave the  Adaptive Accounts, 3rd Party Permissions & Invoicing sections unchecked. 

E. Testing Information

Make sure you provide detailed testing information to Paypal. If you are creating an app for JTicketing, setup a paid event with all settings correctly set. Give paypal instructions on how to buy a ticket on your site & what is expected ( how the payment will be split) on a success case. Also provide access details to your site for Event Owner as well as End user. You might also have to provide Admin access if Paypal requests it ( they didn't in our case) 

That's it ! Now sit back & enjoy that cup of coffee. You deserve it !

Next steps now are that Paypal will review your application & ask for more information which you will need to provide. In 2-3 interactions you should be done. Now wait for the email from Paypal to arrive in your inbox asking for more information. If we have done this right, hopefully, your app will be approved already ! 

Note 

Note that the application is 'Conditionally Approved' as soon as you hit the submit button.. Howeverthis does not grant the access rights needed for 'Chained Payments' that we need to use. If you try to test the live API with this status, it will not work. 

Questions by Paypal during app approval 

HOW FAR AHEAD DO YOU ALLOW EVENT TICKET TO BE SOLD ON YOUR SITE  ?

We Allow for selling tickets upto 3 Months in advance before the actual event date. 

WHAT'S YOUR REFUND AND PRIVACY POLICY

Refund Policy that we enforce as a platform is that free refunds are given up to 60 days before the event.