I am working on a website in which a facility pays us for membership. Their membership payment is the only money we receive. This payment is done via Paypal Website Payments Pro using the DoDirectPayment API.
These members then rent out their facility to customers by listing available blocks of time on our website. The customer would pay for this time block via credit card, also via DoDirectPayment, but this time the payment goes directly to the member's Paypal account.
I have found a lack of clear direction on what needs to be done to enable this. I know I could require all members to have a Paypal Payments Pro account ($30 per month) and store their API credentials (including passwords and signatures) in our system and those payments could be handled directly. But I am vaguely aware of the Third-Party app authorization option... I just can't find info on how it should be set up.
Is it possible to only store the member's Paypal email address and just ask them to authorize our app in their profile?
Also, I saw someone suggest the thrid-party payment recipient wouldn't even need a Pro account. If that is the case, what do I need to change about the API call (I'm using the NVP method) so that our Pro account is leveraged but payment is given to the member?
First, your members will need their own Pro account. The only way to try and get around that would be to have all of the funds come into your account and then disperse them accordingly. This is frowned upon by PayPal and will result in a suspended account.
You could indeed have users enter their API credentials into your application and store them with your customer's profile so that you can include them in API calls for that particular member. You'll want to make sure to encrypt these values if you end up doing that.
The proper way to handle it (since you're a hosted solution) would be using Permissions. You would use your own API credentials, but then pass an additional parameter to flag what account you're making that call on behalf of. This is where the Permissions come into play. Your members will need to Grant API Permission for your app to make the DoDirectPayment call on their behalf.
This can be done manually from within the PayPal account under API Access, or programatically via the Permissions API.