Problem:
I have a personal project and I want to be able to accept donations from users in a kiosk-like fashion using an Android tablet as the display/interface and a credit card reader. I was planning on using the REST API, however, this project is not associated with any business so I can't get a business PayPal developer account to enable accepting payments directly from credit cards.
Questions:
Is it possible to accept credit cards directly without a business account, or create a business account for an individual/personal? Would it be possible for me to get the credit card information and amount first, then pass that information to the PayPal UI to streamline the process so the user only has to tap a confirmation button?
Details:
My ideal user story:
User swipes card through card reader
User enters amount to donate
User confirms donation and is done
Simple and easy.
I realize that I can use a PayPal donate button but that is a much more complex user story and, as far as I know, without hacking the UI it will not be possible to support swiping the card and the user will have to enter the card information manually. Using the mobile SDK it might be possible to support card swiping but I still do not like the added layers of the PayPal log-in screen, having to select "Pay as guest", entering the amount in the textbox, etc. It needs to be an extremely simple process as I outlined above.
Possible (bad) Solution:
My last hope would be to collect the information, then in the background invisible to the user a web view would automate the donation process through PayPal by programmaticly going through the pages and filling out the textboxes. The web view would then be shown to the user once the final confirmation page is displayed for the user to tap the confirmation button. This is extremely hacky and a bad solution, however.
Side Question:
Why can I accept credit card payments through the PayPal UI (via a guest PayPal "account") without a business account, but I can't use the API to do so?
Unimportant Details:
I am building a KegBot which is a "smart" kegerator that tracks beer consumption and other data. The Android tablet displays this information and other fun stuff. I have a donation jar to help pay for the kegs but a common problem (or excuse) is that people don't have cash and only have plastic. My plan is to connect a card reader to the tablet as an accessory (or maybe use PayPal's card reader) to give drinkers a way to easily swipe a card and donate.
I am considering simplifying down the user story even more and making it so when the user swipes their card it automatically donates $5 without any other interaction needed. Maybe a confirmation button.
I tried going through the application to register my developer account as a business account and the form had changed. I was able to select Individual as the business type and use my home address and phone number. The application was approved and I now have a business account capable of processing credit cards using the rest API.
Related
Good day, everyone. I'm a bit stumped on this subject. I have a bit of experience with PayPal developer apps when it comes to subscriptions but this issue with donations is stumping me.
I would like to receive webhooks when a donation is made. I have created a new app in paypal developer dashboard, assigned it the webhook URL (a web app running on Python Flask) and while I have been able to successfully send and receive mock sandbox webhooks from the developer sandbox dashboard for testing so I know everything is configured to work. I just can't figure out how to now establish the live environment donations handling.
I have a business and a developer PayPal account. Within my business account (which I assume is the one that does live donation transactions), I have created a donation button. Logic would dictate that within this donation button setup, there should be a select option to specify the app who's webhooks these donations need to be using. But there is no such thing and PayPal's developer forum is deserted.
The general question is:
How does one set up a donation button to receive webhooks to a certain app or is that not how this works? Because I can have multiple donation buttons for various purposes, campaigns and configurations and I don't need webhooks for all of them. If I am forced to receive all donations, at least I see that there's a donation button ID which I can use to filter out donations coming from other buttons. But I can't even do that if I am not receiving donation webhooks at all.
Looks like for the time being to make this work I have to use Smart Buttons instead of donation buttons in Paypal. With smart buttons I can specify an app id I created in the developer dashboard and receive the webhooks this way.
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.
Is there any way to make the Buy Now page open up the credit card form straight away.
Currently it's buried underneath the "pay with paypal" option that hardly any of my customers want to use. They have to click the tab at the bottom right. It's a very very poorly designed page and plays havoc with my conversion rates.
Could I for example pre-populate the credit card details in my buy now button so that the credit card form would come up initially?
With buttons it is not possible as the form is hosted by PayPal. You may want to look into other integration methods at https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/ where you host the form that holds payment info.
See this for an example
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#create-a-payment
We have a kiosk type of application with an attached credit card reader.
It allows a person to swipe a credit card and select a specific amount of $ to donate.
What are the steps for passing this data to PayPal and conducting an actual donation transaction?
Can you make HTTPS calls from your kiosk app? If so, you should be able to do this with the new REST based APIs fairly simply. Here's the link: https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/direct/accept-credit-cards/
Hope this helps.
I am trying to integrate Google Checkout (as an extra alternative to PayPal) into my website to take simple payments. This payment is for allowing people into a website and not for a digital or physical item that will actually get sent.
Is this possible to do with Google Checkout, as whenever I get a payment from my "Buy Now" button, it creates an "Order" in my account which I then have to click "Ship" in my control panel for. I, of course, don't have an order to "ship" - the IPN (or API callback) does the hard work.
PayPal doesn't have this limitation, I can just take payments from people and process them in my database via their IPN - thus giving the user access - no PayPal intervention required, no clicking "Ship" anywhere. It doesn't seem to care if there are any items to be shipped.
Is there a way of achieving the same thing with Google Checkout (or can you do this simply with Google Wallet? What’s the difference between the two!?).
Any help regarding this would be hugely appreciated.
Thank-you kindly.
Google Wallet/Checkout is not for person to person payments/money-transfer at this time. All their (Google) Payment APIs are based on the purchase of "something" - whether it be physical (shipped) or digital (dowload, app, game, etc.)
It's a not a limitation, it's what it is (at this time).