Collecting a percentage of a paypal sale by a user of your site..

Would like to charge users of my site a percentage fee of all sales made..

[CMChris]

I would like to allow customers to post items for sale on my internet site. For example, a customer might have a eBook product that they would like to sell. My site would provide the medium where customers could find this item.

Where this get's tricky is that I would like to take a percentage of each sale value instead of charging a subscription or posting fee. That is, if an eBook sold for $10.00, I'd like to have the payment split to send say $1.00 to my paypal account and the other $9.00 to the site member's paypal account.

Does this type of functionality exist in a script anywhere? Could it easily be created or created at all? I would much prefer to do it this way as opposed to having to send a monthly invoice etc.

[Lisa]

Sure, if you have a merchant account. Dump all the money in there. Then dump some money in your customers paypal account. But you will need to collect all the money from the end-user and place that in ONE account. Then divide.

[Marcia]

Welcome to the board, Chris. Will it be just downloadable items, or will there also be products that are drop-shipped by vendors?

[sun818]

You'd have to create a web bot that would do this for you. Or you could create a "reverse" affiliate program where you billed your clients for a percentage of sales every month.

[CMChris]

Heya Guys,

Thanks for the welcome to the board and for all the quick replies.

I have thought the same as Lisa at first. What I don't particularily like about this idea is that it links me a little too strongly with my site's users. I would like to be more isolated as simply a service provider to link a buyer and a seller. I suppose a good lawyer could do this anyways, but the site is still only in concept so even a drunken lawyer would be pushing the budget :)

Marcia, I'd like to be able to handle both shipped items as well as downloadable items. However if you are thinking of an already existing solution that deals with only one of the two then I'd still love to explore that.

Sun818, if I understand you correctly I think I've unfortunately come to the same conclusion. I will have to find a way to track all sales then send out an invoice at the end of the month. In the ideal situation I could bill clients immediately when I definitely know that they have funds in their account :P Do you have a suggestion for a good opensource bot or 'reverse affiliate' script at anyrate? I'm business major who's done a little tinkering with web applications so programming ability is limited to intermediate at best.

[sun818]

You could look at the free mTracker at Mal's eCommerce. Create a separate ID for each affiliate. You can preview reports based on each ID and generate reports with order numbers. Good luck getting your money.