I have browsed this forum and been through the PayPal documentation but I am confused. I know what I need but cannot work-out how to specify it for my coder.
We have a .Net application that runs on our internal network. We use this application to create customer quotations. These quotations are emailed to our customers. I simply want the application to be create a link that I can send to the customer such then when it is opened it takes them straight into Paypal and allows then to make a payment for the quotation. Or maybe the link is embedded into the body of the quotation that I send. Either would be fine.
I know of programs that do this (Sage Line50 does it with Sagepay rather than PayPal) but I cannot get my head around the process. Most of my research is talking about taking payments from an external website but trawling through the PayPal documentation it looks like it should be possible. But I cannot figure out whether I need Smart Buttons or PayPal Me. The key thing is that I don't want to force customers to have a PayPal account so guest access must be an option.
Smart Payment Buttons would be ideal, and offer the best payment experience to your customers. However, they require your own server on which to host some HTML/JS for them. They do not offer a link that can take the customer directly from an email to a PayPal checkout.
I recommend using Smart Payment Buttons, if you are able to host one. The flow is:
Email -> page on your server with Smart Button -> PayPal payment.
The key thing is that I dont want to force customers to have a PayPal account so guest access must be an option.
PayPal.me does not meet that requirement
If your requirement is truly a link that proceeds directly:
Email -> PayPal.com checkout for payment (no webserver of yours) ... well, there two solutions for this.
One is to use PayPal invoicing, which can be emailed directly by PayPal, or can be a link which you share yourself (via your own email). A PayPal invoice can be created manually via: https://www.paypal.com/invoice/create . Or programmatically via the invoicing API (see developer.paypal.com)
The second way, which may work fine but is a very old web 1.0 way of doing things, is to start by going to http://www.paypal.com/buttons and create a Buy Now button for an item named "Placeholder", amount "777.88". Expand the section "Step 2", and uncheck the option to Save the button at PayPal. Do not change any of the customization options, particularly ones that add menus or input fields.
Once you have generated the code, click the option above it to remove code protection, and then switch to the E-mail tab.
This will give you a plain HTML link with a description and amount that can be set dynamically by your developer when sending your own email. Additional useful variables, such as invoice (for an invoice number that is unique for what is being paid for, and can't be accidentally paid twice) are documented here.
Again, Smart Payment Buttons should be preferred if you have a web server to act as an intermediary. Here is a skeleton demo of the experience.
Related
Let's say we have a hotel booking system and we want to receive payments via PayPal.
When user goes through the booking process he / she ends up on the page that says "complete your payment here" which is a link to PayPal.
Because this link is in a different system (PayPal) it would be nice if it would be valid for a certain amount of time. Otherwise I can open this link after one day and pay while my real booking was already cancelled.
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The only way to implement something similar I have found so far is to use option "Can customers buy an item when it is sold out?".
The idea is to have a link like this:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&charset=utf-8&business=email-is-here&item_name=Prepayment+of+booking&amount=1¤cy_code=USD¬ify_url=https://my-booking-mega-system.com/pingback&first_name=fn&last_name=ln&expires=1433234400000
PayPal does not provide this functionality.
However, you could build it yourself:
You can add arbitrary functionality (such as checking an expiration date, or inventory, or offer conditions...) by having the "payment" link go to your website rather than PayPal's, do the checks, then redirect to PayPal.
Just respect PayPal's branding rules (I have not checked them recently but they may not let you use their regular button to silently go to your site, but might require that you use a "buy now with PayPal" button or something).
Using PayPal REST SDK you can generate new links to be used by users for checkouts. So every time a user makes a request e.g clicks a button "complete your payment here" a new link is generated for the particular service. So no need for embedding an old link to the button.
Their SDK supports most of the programming languages
and also check out their GitHub for examples and usage.
I plan to create a page on my website that lets others upload games and apps they've built, then sell them via PayPal. Please forgive me if this is a simple question, I've never used PayPal for anything other than purchasing things. I need the button to dynamically change who it's sending the money to. I understand that in order to split who the money is going to, I would need to set up a business account, but if I wanted the creator to keep all of the money they charge for their virtual goods, would it be as simple as changing one of the tags within the PayPal form?
I'm experienced in PHP, SQL and Javascript, so dynamically changing any of the forms elements wouldn't be an issue, but would the payment actually finalize?
Yes, if you're working with Payments Standard it would just be a matter of updating the business parameter with the email address or PayPal merchant ID of the person you want the money to go to.
This isn't the best way to do it, though, because people can see the HTML, copy it, adjust it, and submit payments that are for less than what you set the price at.
In order to protect that sort of stuff you could generate your button code using the Button Manager API, or better yet, go with Express Checkout and the Permissions API (or manually granting permissions) so you can make API calls on behalf of 3rd party users.
My PHP class library for PayPal would make this pretty simple for you.
I want to get paypal button with default amount value by user email ID. So it will automatically use User Email ID registered with the website.
If I understand you correctly, you just need to make sure you're using a non-hosted button from PayPal so that you can see the values and dynamically set the business parameter based on the logged in user.
There are disadvantages to this, though, as people could see the form code, copy it, adjust it, and submit bogus values to your system. You could use IPN to help catch false orders, but it can be a hassle.
I would recommend using the Express Checkout API if you're familiar with web services. This ia a nice and secure way of doing what you need.
I'm using paypal website standard and passing my order id that is generated on my site via item_number field. I was wondering, how does paypal know that the content in the form has not been altered by user? For example, someone could just change the amount of $10 to $5 and paypal would not not have any way of knowing. I've doe this before with other payment processor, and they make me send them md5 hash of amount and some other data + secret key, but I am not sure if paypal has this?
Based on this article, I believe it depends on whether or not you are using "Payment Data Transfer". If you're just using a button, then you'll need to manually verify the payment amount before shipping. If you're using PDT, you should be able to verify the payment_gross amount sent back in the response from PayPal.
Your right -- in general you can't keep someone from altering your data. If you must use PayPal (yeah, I know, no monthly fee) so far as I know you have three options:
Let PayPal host your button data. But this gives you little control over the process.
Manually verify each transaction, checking price etc before shipping item.
Using their API to receive completed transaction to automatically check data.
Another thing to watch out for is calculation of sales tax. PayPal's approach was too simplistic for our needs, which forced me to take control of the checkout process.
See this link.
you should try to implement it using ipn, pdt is prone to not passing the variables from paypal to your website if the user does not press the "go to store" button. as what others had answered hosting your button would make it secure at the cost of flexibility. Here is a link on the variables that could be altered on hosted buttons https://www.x.com/people/PP_MTS_Haack/blog/2009/11/11/override-variables-for-hosted-and-encrypted-buttons , as you would look into the variables, you cant really change the important ones.
The payments we gather on our website are for online subscriptions and registrations for conferences. In both cases, we want to gather absolutely all information other than the payment information ourselves, and ideally pass some of it on to PayPal (so users don't have to fill in name, address, etc. twice).
I know there are solutions where the information is gathered by the server itself and then redirected to PayPal via a web services call but that's not an option, unfortunately. All secure payment information gathered has to happen off-server due to network policy.
In addition, not every form will need to be processed using PayPal. Some people will be paying via check, etc. so they shouldn't be sent to a payment page at all. Most solutions I've looked at have a "Pay with Paypal" button, so I assume a form post is necessary to go to the PayPal site, but ideally we'd want to get there via a 302 redirect. Is that at all possible? (I'm aware we could do something like a form that was auto-submitted by JavaScript but I'd prefer to not go down that route).
Whichever system we implemented would need to handle recurring (periodic) payments also.
Paypal has something called Payflow Pro. They bought it from VeriSign a few years ago.
You can use it to do a full integration with the paypal api. So that the user enters their payment details on your site, and your backend code submits the transaction to paypal's servers. Paypal will then give you a transaction id back. Keep the transaction ID, chuck everything else (like the card number) out the window.
We have several clients that use Payflow Pro. It's very good and easy to use api.
I'm not entirely sure I understand the full scope of your question, but I think I do. I've coded a number these conf. registrations (though I have not interfaced with PayPal...rather iTransact and Plug'NPay) and in my applications, I had to read through the API documentation for the system being used (PayPal in this case). Then I logged into the payment gateway and usually they have an html form generator. All this does, of course, is returns an html form with the fields labeled appropriate to their API (so the billing name and address carry over from your system to PayPal's and the user doesn't have to re-enter their information), shows you what hidden fields you'll need(like cutomer_id, etc) and the form POST path.
Then what I do is I have the user register, preview their order details on another page (where you can choose to drop their info into a DB or wait until AFTER their credit card is processed) and then upon confirmation, they go to PayPal, pay with either credit card OR check (the options always exist) and when they hit confirm, the passback URL you put into a hidden var somewhere, takes you to a custom Thank You page (and hopefully processing script to capture successful transactions) which can be hosted anywhere on your servers.
It's pretty simple, just a bit labor intensive at first as you try and figure out the new form variables specific to a payment gateway API.
Hope this helped!