Can i use pre-approval using PayPal website payments pro? - paypal

I am making a system in which user permits pre-approval of amount. I've used pre-approval with chained payment. But the problem is that my customer gets redirected to PayPal site and also he/she must have a PayPal account or need to create one. So can i make pre-approval payment using PayPal website payment pro? So my customers will not get redirected to PayPal account. And the process becomes more fast? Note :- I don't want to use authorization and capture method. Thanks.
Edit
One more question :- If i make the website in the UK and the currency in GBP, can I still use the American Paypal account for this?

Auth and Capture is what you're asking for, but then you say you don't want it..?? That's what gives you the functionality you're after, though.
You could do a $0 auth and then run DoReferenceTransaction when you're ready to process the payment as opposed to capturing an actual auth if you want.
Those are your only options when working with Pro, though, and it would give you the same sort of preapproval experience for the buyer.
Here are the steps to accomplish what you're after.
Use DoDirectPayment to run a $0 Authorization (card verification). Users will enter their credit card details directly into a form on your site without any redirection to PayPal (and without any knowledge PayPal is being used at all unless you notify them some way.)
Save the transaction ID that you get form this card verification into your transaction history for the customer in your database. This ID is what will be used to process future payments using that credit card.
When you're ready to process a payment for this customer, pull the ID out of the database and use it with a DoReferenceTransaction request to process any amount you need to.
So the card verification is your preapproval, and then running reference transactions are the same as running Pay requests with a Preapproval key. Both methods accomplish the same thing, but one is with direct credit cards and the other is not.
If you're using PHP you can use this PayPal PHP SDK to make all of the API calls very quick and easy for you. If you're using some other language then there are SDKs available for those as well I'm sure.

Please correct me if i am wrong, #Andrew Angell #Ved Pandya
Auth and Capture or Capture payments later method allows you to do direct payment, but it comes with additional charges, which might not suitable for crowdfunding model as refund/ cancel payment is very frequent
Auth and Capture: You are required to pay $0.30 for each "Card Verification Transactions"
Capture payments later: You are required to pay $0.30 for each "Uncaptured Authorization" that you triggered
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

Related

What's the difference between PayPal buttons and PayPal Express Checkout?

What's the difference between PayPal buttons and PayPal Express Checkout?
The second one seems more complicated than the first one to integrate in a web site. When I should consider to use Express Checkout rather than Buttons? What are the advantages?
PayPal Standard buttons are indeed quick and easy, but they are limited. One of the biggest issues with it is with regard to Guest Checkout, which allows non-PayPal account holders to pay with a credit card without creating an account.
With Standard buttons this is browser cookie based, so if anybody has ever signed in to a PayPal account using the browser in use, then the cookie will trigger and assume that the user will be logging in to PayPal. This causes the guest checkout option to be less prominent, and buyers often miss it, which results in lost sales.
Express Checkout uses the APIs which gives you more flexibility, including the ability to force the Guest Checkout experience if you want to regardless of any browser cookies. This can lead to increased conversion rates.
Another thing to consider is that with Standard buttons there is no guarantee the user will make it back to your site. Even if you have Auto-Return enabled in the PayPal account there is a delay, and the user could simply close their browser before they are sent back to your site. With Express Checkout the user has to return to your site before the process can be completed, so this gives you the ability to tie more post-transaction processing procedures into your checkout flow.
Adding PayPal buttons to your website eliminates the need to enter your shipping address. You only verify the purchase details and confirm by the user and it gets supplied by PayPal but in case of Express checkout customer still need to supply their shipping address .
Also in case of express checkout you make API call initially to PayPal and in turn PayPal gives you token id for the payment you are going to make and you use the token(which is unique for every payment) to subsequently authorize and capture the amount from PayPal account once the customer confirms the payment after logging into PayPal account.

Paypal integration back-end?

Is it possible to store the clients credit card information on our secure website database and automatically pass the values to paypal to process without even having to show paypal website?
I would like to do this so client does not have to enter paypal credit card information each time for payment, if they do not want to setup a paypal account.
So basically just use the paypal system in the back-end. After the information is passed to paypal, it processes it, and redirects user to another page.
Update: Paypal Introducing Direct Payment
Can I just pass credit card information from my secure web database to direct payment system, and have it be processed without manually entering data?
It is never recommended to store credit card details in your database for a number of reasons. You really don't need to, either.
Instead, you can use PayPal's DoReferenceTransaction API.
The DoReferenceTransaction API operation processes a payment from a
buyer's account, which is identified by a previous transaction.
Basically, you just pass in the transaction ID of a previous sale or authorization transaction along with a new amount to be charged. PayPal will charge the card using the details they have saved in their system, so you don't have to worry about the hassle of protecting sensitive data like that.

Verifying paypal account

I am building website which requires customer to update paypal account.
Is there anyway to check the reality of customer's account?
When my customer fill out their paypal account in my site, I want them to be directed to paypal login page to login and paypal will return the result.
Does paypal api support this situation?
Pretty much any implementation of PayPal you choose would follow the flow you mentioned.
Payments Standard would allow you to create basic buttons or create an HTML form and POST directly to PayPal to process. It would send the user to PayPal for login and approval to complete the payment. The transaction details would include the payer status (verified or unverified) as well as the address status (confirmed or unconfirmed) and lots of other details about the order.
Express Checkout is basically the API version of Standard, but it's much more advanced and open to integrate in the way that works best for your site or application. In this case, some of buyer/transaction data is available during the process within your app through API requests and responses, and then you can also get to it via transaction details after the fact just like payments standard provides.
Another option would be to use Adaptive Payments, but if you're doing a general payment of any kind you probably don't need that. That's what you would use if/when you start wanting to split payments among multiple receivers within the same transaction, setup preapproval profiles, etc.
If you happen to be working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make the API calls very simple for you.
You could do what PayPal itself does when you register. Send them a few cents and have them tell you how many when they get it. The payment itself will fail if the account doesn't exist, and telling you how many cents proves that they own the account.

Which paypal method should be used for direct / indirect payment?

I am working on one website which has 2 mode of payment for already generated invoice by website.
Method 1. User log in to site, click on invoice and Pay. For this method i have to follow which method where user come back to site with additional parameter i have sent?
Method 2. If user has provided his credit card details, then with help of cronjob / schedule task, payment should be processed and it should notify to website (IPN). For this method i have to follow which method? This is not recurring payment.
Thank you
You could use the DoDirectPayment API for both. This would allow you to process a charge at the time the buyer is checking out, or later through your cron job. Keep in mind that the DoDirectPayment API will only let the buyer pay with a credit card though. If you are wanting the buyer to be able to pay with their PayPal account as well, then you would need to also use Express Checkout.

How to test buyer side of a Credit Card transaction on PayPal Website Payments Pro?

We are running an e-commerce web site on Ruby on Rails and for the processing of Credit Cards we use the ActiveMerchant plugin to interface to our PayPal Website Payments Pro account using our API credentials.
As part of the checkout process we first call the authorize function on our gateway object and then, after some further checks, we perform the capture part.
We have lately been experiencing a bug where an amount gets reserved twice on a customer's account: one charge being only the authorization and the second being the final purchase. So to the client it looks like we are billing him twice (once for authorization, once for final purchase) while we are actually receiving the money only once and the "second charge" on his account is simply an authorization that we don't clear for some reason. (This seems to happen particularly when PayPal FMF rejects our transaction and we re-process.)
I am trying to troubleshoot this by creating PayPal Sandbox Accounts for Buyer and for Seller. I am running through the code line by line via Rails Console and simulating different conditions to try and replicate the error. However, my successful Credit Card transactions only appear in my "seller"/"merchant" account and not in the "buyer" account on the PayPal Sandbox so I cannot see what the effect of my code sequence is having on a customer's card. This post seems to indicate that that is just the way things are and that it is indeed not possible to test the effect on Buyer Credit Card side. This post suggests using PayPal Express Checkout but that is not what we need on our site as we're specifically looking at Credit Card transactions here that are integrated to our site.
How can I test the effect of my code on a client's Credit Card? Is there perhaps something I missed in PayPal or is there maybe some mode/log/monitor in ActiveMerchant that I can use to see this? I need to find the line of code that is causing us to authorize twice.
If the initial transaction is being rejected by FMF, and then you reattempt another transaction this would cause a second hold on the buyers card as this would be a completely different transaction attempt. The bank may have approved the first transaction, but then the FMF filters declined it based on your settings. As far as the bank is concerned, it is still a valid charge that was approved. So when you run your second attempt, this will cause a second hold on the card for the same amount but for a different transaction.