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.
Related
I would like to offer a service to my website's users if they donate to a charity while visiting my website. E.g.: Users visit my website and can unlock something if they click a button to donate $10 to a suggested animal sanctuary charity.
I would like to be able to keep track who donated. Importantly, I am looking for a way where I don't have to handle any money. I just want the money to go directly to the charity and get informed how much was donated by the users visiting my website.
Current solutions seem to suggest that PayPal is the best way to do this. Are there other alternatives also, preferably alternatives that have an API for this very purpose and offer Webhooks??
The best alternative I could come up with so far is to create a GoFundMe, but I would much prefer if it is donated directly to a chartiy. Does anybody have an idea how this could be accomplished?
If you want to use the PayPal Donation flow, you can use the Donate SDK or button, setting a business parameter (rather than a hosted_button_id) to a value that is the PayPal account to receive the donation.
For notification you can use the old IPN service, specifying a notify_url as documented here.
The newer Webhooks service cannot be paired with facilitating Donate flow payments to another account.
In Paypal, I m trying to implemen t a Auto payment system using paypal. Where user can save their card details then whenever the invoice is generated using card details invoice can be paid automatically.
I read the document of paypal but not found regarding that.
Please let me know how can I implement Auto payment system using PayPal.
There's quite a bit of information on the Subscriptions page, but most of that is a generic overview. However, there is link to the Integrate Subscriptions page that gives more links to specific API and SDK instructions.
Follow through the step-by-step information to get all this set up. It'll take a while to get everything correct, so definitely use their testing APIs so you aren't doing a bunch of tests on their production APIs and spending your own money doing it.
Once you get the subscriptions created and someone subscribed, PayPal does the rest. You just need to create the subscription and allow people to subscribe.
Also, PayPal keeps track of credit cards and other payment forms for you, so you don't have to go through all the PCI security procedures for storing that information yourself. That gets real involved and can cause you to get in serious trouble with fines and lawsuits if you aren't certified. It's much easier to use a payment processing gateway such as PayPal for this than create your own, especially since you are going to be using PayPal for processing the payments anyway.
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.
I've done a LOT of research on how to accept payments through PayPal for items whose price changes dynamically.
My site sells a service and there are pretty much an infinite possible prices for the same item based on parameters (price increments in $0.99, 0.20 and 0.10).
I've looked into Paypal Express but it doesn't seem to allow accepting credit cards / debit cards, only payments through Paypal.
I looked into a "hacky" solution that calls the API's BMUpdateButton method to update the price of the button on PayPal's side but this won't work in my case as multiple users may be on the page at the same time and would need to be quoted different prices.
I saw that I can create a payment page from scratch and call APIs to create, accept, and verify payments against PayPal but that's a lot of coding for one and that tremendously reduces security as I don't have SSL and will need to get it which isn't cheap for a start-up business :)
I also came across creating a "non-hosted" button (haven't tried it yet) but that seems to require specifying my business email address in the HTML code which would be far less than ideal.
What I'd really like to do is have a php page act as a gatekeeper between the time the user checks out and what gets sent to PayPal where my PHP can inject the payment amount in and the user can confirm it on the PayPal page and checkout. Any other solution that satisfy the requirements will be truly appreciated.
Requirements again are
Must accept credit cards and PayPal payments
User does not have to have a Paypal account
Price must be dynamic and be able to support multiple users at the same time
Must be as secure as possible. I don't have SSL. An html input type='hidden' won't work as it's too easy to manipulate.
Another thing I thought of just now while typing this post up - if I can securely add quantities of an "item" that may also serve the purpose. For instance, I could add 10 quantities of "items" costing $0.99 and 2 "items" costing 0.10 to get to my required total of 10.19. Is it possible? The quantity boxes, again, must not be changeable by the user. It's more of an all or nothing type of deal :)
Help will be truly appreciated. Please let me know if I've missed anything.
Express Checkout does include "Guest Checkout" so people can pay using a credit card without having or creating a PayPal account. Unfortunately, they just recently made changes so you're forced to click a "Guest Checkout" button before you can see the full credit card form, so some buyers still miss it and don't realize they can do that.
Payments Pro would definitely give you want, but you would indeed need an SSL, and you'd need to make sure you're not saving any credit card details locally.
Payments Advanced is similar to Pro except that the form is hosted within an iframe and resides on PayPal's server so you don't need an SSL that way.
I personally prefer Payments Pro.
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.