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Zuora Payments

Zuora BillingZuora PaymentsZuora PlatformZuora CPQZephrZuora RevenueAccounts ReceivableRelease NotesBasicsEntitlementsSupport and policies
Zuora BillingZuora PaymentsZuora PlatformZuora CPQZephrZuora RevenueAccounts ReceivableRelease NotesBasicsEntitlementsSupport and policies

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PayPal Adaptive Payments gateway integration

Support for Simple payments

Zuora supports PayPal Adaptive simple payments, allowing one-to-one transactions where a customer pays a merchant for services. The API also offers flexibility for parallel and chained payments, though only simple payments are supported by Zuora.

Adaptive Payments can be used to support the traditional payment where there is one sender of the payment (your customer) and one receiver of the payment (you, the merchant). For example, a customer purchases a subscription to your service and they make a single payment to you for the service. Simple Payment.jpg

The Adaptive Payments API is flexible and enables the ability to pay, one to one (simple payments) or one to many (parallel payments), and pay a primary receiver to multiple secondary receivers of the payment (chained payments). Zuora's integration currently supports the PayPal Adaptive simple payments only.

Approvals for Payments

PayPal requires the sender (your customer) to approve all payments being made. The sender can provide approval via 3 different methods:

  • Method 1: Preapproved Payments (Recommended for Recurring Payments)Your customer logs into PayPal only once to set up a preapproval agreement that lets you (the merchant) charge their PayPal account for recurring payments. Zuora supports preapproved payments.
  • Method 2: Explicit Approval PaymentsThe sender logs into PayPal.com to approve every single payment. This requires contacting the customer on a recurring basis (as frequently as their subscription is billed) to approve payments before payment can be collected.
  • Method 3: Implicit Approval Payments (Not Applicable for Merchants Using Zuora)You (the merchant) are the sender of the payments and also the submitter of the payments to PayPal via the Adaptive Payments API. This is not applicable as your customer is the sender of payments and you are using Zuora to submit the transactions to PayPal.

Void payment is not supported

In general, payments can only be voided before the payment is settled. PayPal does not support the void operation with Adaptive Payments because it is dealing with only completed payments. The simple payments created using this integration settle immediately and thus this operation is not required for the integration. If you need to reverse a payment, you can create a refund. Zuora supports referenced refunds for Adaptive Payments.

Last updated: October 10, 2025