I have a registration website. Tickets can be purchased through PayPal Checkout, but of course in this case users are redirected to PayPal.com to pay there.
Problem: I don't want to write anything in my website's database before payment is complete. I want to write everything when users are back to my website from PayPal checkout page.
Question: what is the proper way of storing user info and purchase info during PayPal Checkout payment process? Is PHP session variables the right, professional response to this problem? Or is there a more reliable solution?
The recommended method would be to use Instant Payment Notification (IPN). It will POST transaction data to a listener script that you build which can receive that data and then update your database, send out email notifications, etc. in real-time.
IPN is separate from your actual checkout flow, though. It's just a script that sits there listening for data to hit it, and PayPal pushes data to it in real-time as transactions hit your account.
Here's an IPN template I built years ago that would get you up-and-running very quickly.
Related
Using the PayPal permissions API can you receive notifications from payments made after a customer clicks on a payment button, proceeds to PayPal, and then pays?
I notice they have IPN, but will this work with the permissions API?
Thanks!
You can include NotifyURL in your API requests to set a URL for IPN to POST data to. It's not something that technically "works with the permissions API" but any transaction that is made would indeed trigger the IPN.
If you're building an app for 3rd parties to use, though, and you're passing NotifyURL in your API requests, that will override any IPN configuration each individual merchant using your tool might have setup on their own. This can cause frustration for such users because then their own IPN solution doesn't get hit when they take payments through your app.
If you're going to do that I recommend setting up a way for your users to enter their own IPN URL in your app settings, and then if they have a value, forward the POSTed data to their URL when PayPal sends it to yours. That way both IPN scripts will get hit and process the data accordingly.
A user clicks on a buy now button on my website which takes them to PayPal where they can purchase my item. I then receive the relevant information through my IPN listener. This all works fine with sandbox accounts.
To implement this with my live business account, am I right in thinking I don't need to worry about creating live API certificates etc? I understand this is needed when making API calls to live accounts but I'm assuming a simple buy now button doesn't need this stuff setup.
Correct. You only need API credentials when you will make an API call. IPN is a push notice, so PayPal is sending the data to you instead. All you need to do is post the data back to PayPal to verify it and then process the POST data.
we have a paypal payment system integrated into our website so people can register and choose a subscription. The subscription part works fine as the payment goes through and the IPN hits our website and updates our systems. Now we want users to be able to cancel their subscription from within our website so we have a custom cancellation button which when clients click, should send a request to paypal and cancel their subscription. We managed to get this going on sandbox test system however since we have brought the system into live testing we can not get the cancellation feature to work. So currently when the user clicks on cancel button, i think paypal is not being notified and hence no IPN received from PayPal.
Do you know what all info we need in order to cancel the subscription from our website. I know there is a way where users can log into paypal and cancel their subscription or we can log into our paypal and cancel their subscription but we want it to work from our website.
Please help!
Thanks.
When you say you have it working on the sandbox but not live, what exactly is going wrong when you try it live?
I'm actually a little confused by that, because my initial answer was going to be that you can't kill subscriptions via the API unless you're using Recurring Payments. Standard subscriptions aren't accessible via the API.
If you're saying you're doing that in the sandbox, though, then there must be something I'm unaware of..??
On that note, I know the PayPal system pretty well, so I'm thinking maybe you did Recurring Payments on the sandbox, but live you're using Standard Subscriptions..?? If that's accurate then you'll need to move to recurring payments instead of standard subscriptions on the live site.
I have downloaded sample code from paypal to allow me to use parallel payments via their sandbox accounts. When I run parallel.php, I get redirected to paypal's sandbox login page.
How am I supposed to know "server side" that the payment has been made successfully, so I can update my database records?
I believe you have to work with PayPals IPN system. This will basically send a confirmation to your server that tells you it has gone through.
https://www.paypal.com/ipn
Paypal lets you register a notification url which is part of the IPN (instant payment notification IIRC) system. So if someone pays by a delayed payment (such as a bank transfer) the transaction will update days later. You need to have an application (web page) on your server that can be called by Paypal with transaction details to update a payment.
You'll need to create an initial transaction record in your system when paypal redirects back to you so refer to their documentation for that. I'd also recommend looking at either OSCommerce or Zen cart for an idea of how they do it as they support the same kind of thing.
I've got a web application with a form where users can sign up for a seminar. The process is currently as follows:
Register for seminar
Registration success page with Paypal Buy-Now button to make payment
Paypal payment
Registration completion page
At present, emails are sent to the admin and the user at step 2 after registering confirming their registration. This needs to be changed so that the emails are actually sent in step 4, after payment has been made.
The application is built in ASP.NET, and all of the code to send emails, etc is all done. I'm curious as to what is the best way to trigger a process on the main website using the users details after they have completed the Paypal payment process.
From what I can see, there are the following options:
Store the data in the session. When the user returns to the registration completion page, retrieve the information and send the emails. My concern with this is that I've worked on a project in the past implementing this and it never worked very well, with the session getting lost.
Store the data in the database. Have the Paypal redirect include the transaction details in the querystring to the return page, which can retrieve the registration details using the email address and send the emails. However, this may not work if the email address used on Paypal is different from the one used to register (which is quite likely in this scenario).
Post all the details to Paypal, so that they are included in the transaction. Downsides: Won't send confirmation email to the user, only the admin (and assuming that the Paypal email address is the same as the email to which payment notifications should be sent). Also not sure if this can be used with hosted buttons.
I'm sure this is a common problem, and any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
Use paypal instant payment notification
When the order is placed on your site, put it into a db table, with whatever you need to record. I then have an OrderId (from the db table) that I pass to paypal as an 'invoice' field, this gets passed back via ipn with a payment status etc.