So I'm building a membership website. The principle is simple in that you sign up for a recurring membership, then you are allowed to register, and the server will be notified of all payments or non-payments so it can keep the membership active or disable it for non-payment.
So two questions, and this is pretty broad since I'm just looking for the right place to start.
Does this require full PayPal SDK integration (I'm using CakePHP) or is it possible to use the simpler Premade solutions - I guess my question here is, is the only way for PayPal to contact my server when a member pays through full integration?
Is it possible to set this up completely on a local host? I'm building the website on my localhost of course it occurs to me that I don't have it connected to the internet for PayPal to communicate with it directly. Are there work arounds for this?
Really just looking for anyone experienced with this type of E-Commerce to chime in. I'm very experienced with PHP so I'm really just looking for a place to start.
Related
I have a site making calls to the PayPal sandbox. This has worked fine in the past. Today, all of my calls are returning INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR. I am using the Node.js paypal-rest-sdk module to make these calls.
The debug ID of the transactions are 38ddafc521580, bc93a6d0f3b60, and fb3f7b74697c9.
On a related note - I don't see anywhere on PayPal developer support where you can directly ask for help with these issues; PayPal seems to just point to StackOverflow. Is that correct? Seems like I should just be able to log into the PayPal developer portal and ask for help with specific debug IDs, or at least see some more detail for those transactions on why they failed. Using StackOverflow for this doesn't feel "right" to me...
UPDATE: An update was pushed out just now that should resolve most of the external issues. Can you all please let me know if you are still seeing problems? There are a few outstanding problems in the cleanup, so I want to make sure they aren't impacting anything.
Full disclosure: I work at PayPal
I just ran a test against sandbox and have confirmed that there appears to be some downtime. I've notified the sandbox team of the problem and have provided your (and my) debug ids for them to take a look. We're on it and will hopefully have a resolution shortly.
From the support side, you're correct, there is no forum system for technical integration issues. For problems with downtime, you can report those to the technical support team at https://www.paypal-techsupport.com/app/ask/session/L3RpbWUvMTQ1OTM0NzAxNi9zaWQvVC00anZNTW0%3D, or contact support directly from https://www.paypal.com/selfhelp/home. You can always reach out to the merchant technical support Twitter handle at https://twitter.com/paypal_mts as well.
For integration troubles, that's where SO would be best, where we can help work through code issues.
The server errors have gone away, but they've been accompanied by a massive uptick in customers getting a message that reads "the card you entered cannot be used for this payment". So they're still not able to make payments. We had the first couple contact PayPal, but we've gotten so many that it seems like it's not a coincidence. Do we really need to refer people to PayPal (which will cause them grief, surely, and cause PayPal to get a bunch of extra calls) or is there still something going on?
I have a use case in which we need to transfer funds from our merchant account to our customer local bank.
I found paypal legacy api which says it can make ach transfers.
I want to know how secure is using this legacy api and whether this is supported anymore or not.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Yes, it still works fine and will continue to work for a very long time. Too many solutions up-and-running on it for them to dump it, and it's also still much more mature (loaded with more features) than REST. They continue to add new features, too, so for REST to catch up it's going to a while.
REST API still needs lot of features, so I don't think that they will shut Classic API down soon.
Im not sure if this is possible but I am trying to setup two forms for a payment option for the following website
http://103.14.141.156/~wwwbetac/index.php/en/checkout
Pretty much over in New Zealand we have a company called Farmlands. We need a simple option under Payment Options or (Select Payment) and it says Farmlands.
From there they can go into a form which just has Farmlands Name and Farmlands Account Number.
Is this at all possible? Sorry if it doesnt make any sense.
Thanks
Short answer - yes this can be done as a VM payment plugin.
Longer answer - Payment plugins in VM2.0 are simply Joomla plugins. They do follow specific rules to work as a payment plugin so your best bet (unless you are an experienced programmer) would be to take an existing plugin and make some modifications to match your needs. You didn't mention if Farmlands has an API you will be communicating with or not. If it does, then you will want to start with something like the Authorize.net AIM plugin. If not, then you can use the Offline Payments plugin as your starting point.
Here is the documentation for VM Payment plugins - http://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki/Payment_plugins
I decided to look into using Google Identity Toolkit. I knew I liked the UI, and the idea of using a "federated" login system. I'm now having my doubts, as while my site works well with gmail/ymail/hotmail etc, it doesn't seem to support any of the social platforms.
Essentially, I just need an email address from people to be registered with the site, so I thought GITKit was the perfect solution.
Should I have gone down a custom route (like stackoverflow?), or have I missed some of the GITKit documentation?
Any help would be much appreciated.
I did do a fair amount of googling prior to posting that question. However, I have come accross some answers. Rather than delete my post - I guess I should share the information. If others thought the information was clear, please delete this thread!
Firstly, there is a page identifying how to add custom IDP's: https://sites.google.com/site/gitooldocs/customidps
There is also a sample site (http://www.openidsamplestore.com/localmapping/) which uses facebook.
How does the advanced demo work for identity providers who are not
E-mail providers, such as social networks?
The hardest part about
designing the advanced site was to find a way to handle all the
edge-cases that can happen with these types of identity providers.
Google previously published a summary of best-practices for
account-linking that describes why these types of identity providers
are so much harder to support. However this demo provides a user
self-service mechanism for all the tricky cases to avoid the costs
that a website might otherwise occur if those users contact a customer
support representative.
Finally, a best practices run-down is available here:
https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin/loginlogic
EDIT 1 :
If that identity provider asserts email addresses that it does not
host, we suggest you also implement additional account linking logic.
A future version of GITKit will add support for these type of
identity providers, such as social networks, which will avoid the need
to implement that logic
Perhaps GITKit is the future after-all... Would be nice to have an idea of the time-frame in which this support will be added though...
EDIT 2 :
Direct from the horses mouth (Eric Sachs # Google - Source Link):
That feature is not expected to be generally available in 2011. We
are shooting for Q1 2012
Looks like someone got it working back in Dec 2011 but there is still an outstanding issue with mapping the id returned to an email address. It was probably resolved:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-identity-toolkit/facebook/google-identity-toolkit/2218yW4zXw8/28X7btJEh_sJ
Here is the documentation for the sample store including brief info on basic, mobile and advanced mode (using facebook):
https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/Home/openidsamplesite
An out-of-the-box IDP for facebook and twitter has not yet been released.
I've done quite a bit of searching for a CMS platform or robust framework that will perhaps facilitate the management of signup and subscriptions right of the box with a Twilio tie in.
Thus far I've only been successful at finding how many startups have been funded by the Twilio fund, who's building the nextgen voice enabled app, and various other things of that nature vs any real meat. Seems that there's a dearth of meaningful information without applying a plethora of negative google filters to reduce matches and even then it's still not giving anything real meaningful wrt my search.
So, I'm hoping that someone may have a better eye on the lay of the Twilio landscape as far as already existent systems go that can handle the bulk of needs that exist for a "regular" CMS esque site that needs to also handle subscriptions and e-commerce related tasks.
Hitherto I've just planned to build something out myself, but I wanted to do a sanity check before I spend a lot of time that could perhaps be obviated.
My suggestion would be to find a CMS that does everything you want (except the twilio links), on the platform you want, and then just add the Twilio stuff in. Twilio is simple to use, and should be simple to add-on to most open source CMS's. It'll probably be the easiest part of the project....