Accepting credit card payments within a Windows application - paypal

Question please regarding credit card payments.
I have a Windows application (WPF) that is displayed on the Internet (type in my website address, the app is displayed). Due to limitations of third-party software I use to display the application on the Internet, I cannot display a browser (at least not WebView2) with my application.
In order to accept credit card payments, I need another method. I have spent numerous hours (too many) becoming knowledgeable about payment aggregators, payment processors, etc. and looking at very many of them.
Is there a vendor of some sort that would allow me to take credit card information from within my application, send the information via an SDK/REST and complete the purchase? For verification, they could (for instance) send a code to the purchaser's phone that they would type into my app and I would forward that to the payment aggregator to verify the purchase.
I'm open to all suggestions with this.
As I see it, my options are
us something else than WebView2. I am unaware what that something else would be and I am hesitant to pursue it due to the 100+ hours trying to get it to work with WebView2 and PayPal.
locate a vendor that allows me to take credit card information from within my and pass them the information. Or, the vendor has an SDK for Windows applications that could use which would handle the UI and REST calls.
Thank you in advance. I'm pretty spent looking at all this. Since WebView2 won't work for me, I's just as soon make calls in code to a payment aggregator/processor without having to mess with a browser. Again, I am open to any suggestions.
Thank you in advance for your help and time.

Related

Can I achieve a groupon / kickstarter like payment system with paypal uk

I.e. user clicks buy, I authorize their card and wait 2 weeks and see if enough users have pre ordered a given product before charging them and shipping.
I'd like the following -
To avoid pci compliance I'd prefer to whisk users off to paypal for getting c.c. details.
progmatically reauthorizing any preorders and capturing funds is fine after 2 weeks. But for my prototype doing this via the paypal account dashboard is fine.
my app being notified when a user successfully preorders (ie. there card is authorized by paypal) in order to update my "preorder" counter on the site.
For my prototype I want to avoid as much coding on this so offloading as much as possible to paypal, even if it means I have to manually handle reauthorizations and payment captures is actually better in the short term.
Can paypal uk provide this functionality and if so which business solution is this? standard or pro?
You should be able to do this with standard; However considering that you eventually would want a "tighter" integration with your back-end systems and, it might be a good idea to start with pro itself.

PayPal MassPay API - How does it work exactly?

I have gone through the Paypal website, looked at their dozens of FAQS and documents, and still don't have a great idea as to how to integrate the Paypal Masspay API. I was hoping I'd have better luck on here :).
I have an app that gives users prizes, with an oracle SQL database that populates whenever a user redeems a prize.
Would I need to download the SDK onto my app, include the PayPal IPN, and call the MassPay API each time a user redeems a prize?
I have attempted to contact Paypal multiple times to no avail.
Not sure which aspect of your question is most problematic for you. I assume that you've looked at the concept diagram at
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/mass-payments
where the Excel worksheet is roughly analogous to a table's (or query's) worth of payees.
You would normally provide scripting code on your server/website that would submit that payee/amount list through the MassPay API calls against the PayPal website. If you only have one or two payees at a time, this is not the usual way to make a payment to your users (one-offs are generally Adaptive Payments API). It's not a downloadable app, though.
So is your app something the users download and interact with your site? If so, the correct place to put the code that faces PayPal (and actually transfers money around) is on your site's server. Not on the handset.
I finally reached a capable support member of the PayPal Team. The answer I got:
No SDK needed. All I need to do is set up an API call from my server to their server each time I want to reference a payment.

Is it possible to automate payments through someone else's gateway?

Suppose some online retailer uses XYZ Bank's payment gateway. Is it possible to do the job of filling in card details and proceeding through the entire process using a script? If yes, is it legal?
Update:
To make the question more clear, I'll give a scenario.
Suppose the retailer we're talking about is Amazon, and I wan to use a card/netbanking (not PayPal). I want to be able to place an order on Amazon using a script which does the job of filling my cart and making the payment. Say the cart thing has been taken care of. How do I automate the payment process now? If it's allowed that is. Card details etc will not of some user, but my own, so no security issues with that I suppose.
The payment API would usually support something like this. For example, if we look at Paypal's direct payment api, they provide secure means for you to pass credit card numbers, etc to Paypal to process the payment.
If you are thinking to do this to process recurring payments, then you are doing it the wrong way. You should never store any credit card details unless you are PCI-DSS compliant. This takes a lot of work and auditing, so it is somewhat rare for small and medium companies to do it. For recurring payments, store the credit card numbers with your payment gateway (most should provide a means to do this) and the gateway should return a token to store. Every time you want to charge the card, simply pass the token to your gateway.
Given the new information:
What you are trying to do is to automate the browser (that's the best way to do it). You could write a script that connects to Amazon, loads the page, fills in the POST variable, send it back, get results and so on, but it is not very robust. For example, if amazon changes the name of a few post variables or even the markup, then your script would fail.
The best way to do this is to use a Browser Automation framework. Selenium is prbably the most popular and most well known. It is often used to automate testing user interfaces, but it is also useful for doing something like you are suggesting. You can use Selenium IDE which is a Firefox addon to quickly reproduce and replay recorded actions. For something more advanced and highly scriptable, try Selenium WebDriver.
As for whether this is legal or not, I don't see why it shouldn't be legal if you are using your own credit cards and what not.
If you are using your own credit card details it's at your own risk so very minimal legel issues. But it's always a good idea to store & transmit(SSL) card details encrypted for some peace of mind. But if it's for wider public you will need to look into PCI guidelines and matching class requirements.

Ticket processing system

Is paypal a suitable system for handling event ticket payments. All I want to do is create a page with event details, a list of hOw many tickets are left and a secure payment handling. Systems like eventwax seem to charge for use of there system and then paypal charges you too. I just dont get why people are paying twice. Also does anyone have any other recommendations for similar sites like eventwax
Google Checkout lets you do something that will work for you. Basically you create a Google Docs spreadsheet that follows a special format and contains the items that you sell and the quantities remaining. Then, you can make an HTML button that you can embed in your page. When a user clicks the button, it processes the selling of a specific item from that spreadsheet. Google handles everything else automatically - it subtracts one from the quantity field in the spreadsheet, processes the payment and sends you an email with the purchase and shipping details. Little to no programming required.
Of course, this can't work with PayPal.
First off, paypal comes in many different flavors. From the simple they host the order form and process payments way on up to all you do is pass them the credit card info and charge amount and they process it.
With that in mind I don't believe they support selling a limited quantity of items. This is something you would have to provide with your site.
Which leaves us with: are you asking a "how do I code this" type of question or something more general. If the former then please provide language and what you have so far. If the latter, then you might try at http://webmasters.stackexchange.com
Now regarding eventwax charging for usage, that is a perfectly legit thing to do. They are providing a service which allows people to sell a limited number of things, ensure that those things aren't over sold (which can be difficult depending on your db transactional experience), and handle payment processing.
All said and done there are really several companies which will get a piece of the action so to speak. Paypal is one, the credit card companies are another. If you are using paypal's payflow pro gateway then there is at least two other companies involved: your bank and the transaction processor themselves.
Which leads us to why people pay companies like event wax. Quite frankly, it's easy they don't have to screw around with programming something, and it works right now. There's a lot that can be said about doing things this way. Usually you just include all of this into the cost of doing business.

How to implement payment to multiple suppliers

I'm trying to integrate a payment mechanism to my site. The scenario that I need is not trivial and can be explained by the following example:
User pays upfront for a subscription program (i.e. receiving Netflix). User is able to make changes to the subscription (i.e. change number of movies checked out each time from 4 to 2)
User is able to buy additional one time purchases via the provider's site (Netflix) supplied by 3rd parties. These items (i.e. popcorn, snacks) get billed to the same credit card as the subscription without having to go through the process of resubmitting the credit card information.
Of course, my site takes also a small fee for the transactions :-)
I was wondering if this is supported by PayPal, Google Checkout or someone else.
Thanks.
The Paypal api can handle all of those processes.
I seem to have dropped the ball on what kind of answer you wanted so I'll leave it at that.
If you have some feedback, more direct questions I will try to answer as much as I can
--
The money would best go through you first, unless somehow you can convince your customers its normal to bill them per item. Also if they pay by credit card you should only bill them once as you would incur fees on every payment. I don't know of anyway to bill once but distribute the payments.
As for the paypal docs..
Very good resource, there is also some sample code for most major web languages
Also this will get you started if you don't have a developer login
Their developer support is also pretty good. One thing a lot of people seem to screw up when starting out with the paypal api is not setting the latest version in the configs so don't forget to update that to the latest release. :)
Disclaimer..
Yea I know there is a lot of bad press about paypal and crazy stuff happening, but they do get the job done most of the time, its not my fault the customers love to use it.