do paypal payouts on a schedule

[chadwhitacre]

Right now a user has to keep track of their balance and email me/us whenever they want a payout via PayPal. In private email from @mpapis I see an expectation that PayPal payouts happen regularly whenever a minimum balance is reached (he suggest $20).

This would depend on collecting a PayPal email address (#89). Then we'd add an admin dashboard page showing balances for people with a PayPal email address, and would do those manually each Thursday following the payday script.

[chadwhitacre]

Should look into Mass Pay for this, per @Tomas-M at #126 (comment).

We're sorry, but your PayPal account isn't currently eligible to send mass payments. Please contact either PayPal Customer Service or your account manager.

[Tomas-M]

PayPal account must be Premier or Business to send mass payments, as far as I know. If your PayPal account is Personal, then it won't work. Converting to Premier is simple.

[chadwhitacre]

We have a Business account so it must be a Premier thing.

[chadwhitacre]

Hmmmm ...

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/personal_vs_business-outside

It actually says that Mass Pay is a Business account feature, and yet I still get the above error message. I will have to contact support, it sounds like.

[mvdkleijn]

Just a quick remark: please keep in mind that PayPal isn’t available in all countries. For example, a number of eastern European countries are not covered by PayPal. One of my friends lives there and actually wants a PayPal account, god knows why, but can't. Also, even when PayPal is available, it does not always support payouts to local bank accounts. Which would be necessary if you'd want to, say, buy a sandwich. 😃

[zbynekwinkler]

You made me check their website and you are right. I am happy to be in a country where withdraw to a local account is possible.

Actually, is it possible to have a bank account in the US even as a nonresident? Would social security number be enough? I presume that after that bank-to-bank wire transfer is possible.

[mvdkleijn]

@zwn - I believe you have to be a resident, or at least a registered residence. One of the reasons why Kickstarter users have problems because they only allow US bank accounts. (except for the UK version now)

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @nicferrier in Twitter DM

[chadwhitacre]

Just got off the horn with PayPal customer support. After a couple redirects I found someone who could help. She asked me why I wanted to turn on mass payments and I told her I had a website for giving gifts to people and I wanted to use mass pay to deliver the gifts. Satisfied with that, she put me on hold while she enabled mass pay on our account. When she returned she ran me through some identity verification ("What cities have you been associated with? A B or C" etc.), and that was it. Should be enabled within 24 hours.

She did say early in the call that mass pay requires funds to be present in our PayPal account before initiating the mass pay. I asked her whether that meant it wouldn't pull automatically from our attached bank account, and she seemed to say yes, that's what it meant. She said it can take 3-5 business days to transfer funds from the bank account to PayPal. If that's true, then either:

• We keep a standing balance in PayPal so we can mass pay quickly following payday.
• We transfer precise funds to PayPal after payday and mass pay the following Tuesday.

I'm reluctant to keep a standing balance in PayPal, because of PayPal's reputation for freezing funds:

One of the most common problems encountered by PayPal users is the sudden and inexplicable freezing of their accounts. If your PayPal account is frozen, you can't add or withdraw any funds from your account, and you're required to go through a long, complicated process to verify your identity. Some users claim that PayPal has simply seized their funds and never returned them.

Paying out a week late is obviously non-ideal as well.

We have four people we're doing this for now, which isn't that many. I've paid them out for this week. I'm going to try out Mass Pay next week without pre-funding the account. If indeed that doesn't work then I think we should just continue to do this manually for now under the "Do Things that Don't Scale" principle.

[nicferrier]

Paying out a week late is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. I think that scales better than not doing it.

[seanlinsley]

@whit537 as I understand it, whether you deposit money and then "immediately" start a mass-pay or you have a standing balance, both situations in reality require a standing balance. The account could be frozen at any time, so instead what you should to focus on is having a small of a balance as possible to cover this week's payouts.

[mpapis]

I'm also fine with any payments - one week delay is perfectly fine.

[mvdkleijn]

If we have a delay of exactly a week, it'd be like PayPal accounts are simply post paid / on a later cycle. That'd be easy enough to explain in the docs.

Playing Gittip consious: having a standing balance on PayPal would be in direct conflict with #1383

[mvdkleijn]

BTW: How is this infrastructure? Its a very user visible change.

[chadwhitacre]

@mvdkleijn This is not a user-visible change because it does not modify the www.gittip.com website UI. This is a change to a behind-the-scenes process that, as a side-effect, will delay payment to the four users in question.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm running an experiment with this this week for @alexpott @nicferrier @jezdez and @litenull. They are the four I've started paying out to regularly. I tried running a Mass Pay (the feature is on now for Gittip's PayPal account). I got this message:

So I've funded Gittip's PayPal account for the amount needed and will run the Mass Pay when that clears, which they are saying will be 3 to 5 days.

@alexpott @nicferrier @jezdez @litenull If that is an unacceptable delay, let me know and I'll do an instant transfer for you instead of waiting for the mass pay.

[litenull]

No problems for me. :)

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Chad Whitacre [email protected]:

I'm running an experiment with this this week for @alexpotthttps://github.com/alexpott
@nicferrier https://github.com/nicferrier @jezdezhttps://github.com/jezdezand
@litenull https://github.com/litenull. They are the four I've started
paying out to regularly. I tried running a Mass Pay (the feature is on
now for Gittip's PayPal account). I got this message:

[image: screen shot 2013-09-26 at 11 24 41 am]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/134455/1219183/f7d71cb0-26c6-11e3-8d8a-c92a7a4fb98d.png

So I've funded Gittip's PayPal account for the amount needed and will run
the Mass Pay when that clears, which they are saying will be 3 to 5 days.

@alexpott https://github.com/alexpott @nicferrierhttps://github.com/nicferrier
@jezdez https://github.com/jezdez @litenullhttps://github.com/litenullIf that is an unacceptable delay, let me know and I'll do an instant
transfer for you instead of waiting for the mass pay.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/943#issuecomment-25181407
.

LP, Tomaž :)

[chadwhitacre]

It really seems to me that we are going to need to use PayPal for a while yet while we bring Trans-Pay (#417 and/or MangoPay (#891) online. There are enough people in the mix now with PayPal that manual payouts via Instant Transfer is not the best option. It's error-prone and time-consuming. We need to do MassPay.

It's risky, but I think we need to keep a portion of our escrow in our PayPal account so that we can do a MassPay each week with a minimum of lag time. Two possible futures:

• PayPal freezes our account. We kick and scream until they unfreeze the account, then we clear out our PayPal balance and turn off the PayPal option.
• We get off the ground with Trans-Pay and/or MangoPay before PayPal notices us, and we can simply retire the PayPal option without incident.

[chadwhitacre]

Oh btw, the first MassPay is done! @alexpott @jezdez @nicferrier and @litenull should have payments coming, with a corresponding record on their Gittip history page.

The fee for MassPay out from Gittip is a straight 2%. I wrote the masspay.py script (#1582) to compute this, as there is no way with MassPay to tell PayPal to have the recipient pay the fee (as there is with Instant Transfer). The fee is recorded on the Gittip history page.

[chadwhitacre]

I just initiated a transfer from Balanced to New Alliance. After that clears (tomorrow) I'll move a chunk of that over to PayPal ahead of next week.

[chadwhitacre]

Just checked, transfer from Balanced to New Alliance hasn't cleared yet.

[chadwhitacre]

PR #1582 is ready for review and merge.

Here's the weekly process I'm envisioning:

• Somehow produce an input.csv file each week with these fields: username, paypal_email, amount. Maybe we can use a Heroku Postgres dataclip for this? They have a CSV export option from there. Or maybe just a masspay.sql script that I use locally w/ the copy command?
• Run ./masspay.py to compute the output CSVs from the input CSV.
• Do the MassPay through the PayPal UI (maybe automate it using the MassPay API (PDF)?).
• Run ./masspay.py to record the MassPay exchanges in the Gittip database.

[chadwhitacre]

We deployed the paypal_email change on #1582 (see hiccup at #1583). I've added PayPal emails for the four I MassPaid yesterday. Punchlist to close this ticket:

• figure out how to produce input.csv
• pre-fund PayPal account
• contact everyone we've PayPal'ed in the past and invite them to join this MassPay program Actually, let's wait for people to contact us and add them then. This is a temporary program, not something we want to really promote.
• run one more successful MassPay top to bottom
• teach masspay.py script about $20 maximum fee per payment Don't bother with this for now. We want to be off of PayPal by the time someone reaches $1,000 per week. If not we should notice that the fees don't line up when we go to do the MassPay.

[chadwhitacre]

I've added @Higgo's PayPal email in the db.

[chadwhitacre]

For Mass Payments to recipients outside the U.S., the fee is 2% of total up to a maximum of $20.00 USD per payment, or the foreign currency equivalent of $20.00 USD.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/mass-payments

• teach masspay.py script about $20 maximum fee per payment (See above)

[chadwhitacre]

The Balanced transfer to New Alliance has cleared, and I've moved some of that to PayPal (3-5 days).

[chadwhitacre]

The transfer from New Alliance to PayPal hasn't cleared yet. Hopefully tomorrow. :-(

[chadwhitacre]

The money has cleared PayPal. We now have a balance there, though under transactions it says "Sorry, we couldn't retrieve your data. Please try again later." But I'm using the beta so who knows?

[chadwhitacre]

I'm seeing transactions just fine now in PayPal.

I missed the MassPay last week. I'm hoping we have enough in PayPal to cover last week and this week today.

[chadwhitacre]

I've submitted our second MassPay, using the script in #1625. I've started another transfer from New Alliance to PayPal so we're ready for next week.