I have a form where a team signs up their players and then are transported to paypal to make a registration payment then I receive an IPN when everything is complete. I am doing a similar form and found that Paypal has changed a lot since I created that form.
Is there still a simple way to transfer to paypal, user pays, send back to success page?
It seems like now I have to send the user to paypal using SetExpressCheckout then Getting Payer Details Using GetExpressCheckoutDetails and then DoExpressCheckoutPayment. Am I making it too complicated? It seems I'll be bouncing a registrant around to a bunch of unnecessary pages just to get a payment for a single item. What is the simplest way to do this and still get an ipn to insert into my db? Thanks!
Well EC is the preferred option because its easier for the merchant, but you can use PayPal Standard as well. PayPal standard can be implemented simply as a button. Its pretty simple, but it does not use API calls; its just simply form data posted to PayPal, then PayPal sends you the confirmation of payment in the form of an IPN. the customer is not "forced" back to your site either.
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/products/paypal-payments-standard
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I new to paypal integration in asp.net . I found very difficult to understand the paypal api .
I under stood two types -
inline html form ( i.e is also called buy button )
payflow api
my questions are :
which one must be used for recurring payment ( subcription packages for end user)?
in first type , few sites suggested to use IPN for confirmation of payment. I want to know is it neccessary since without using IPN, also using notify_url we can confirm the payment success (as per my knowledge notify_url returns to your site when payment is completed at paypal site)?
for recurring payment , do i need to store user account details (i.e credt card or paypal account ) in my databas?
please do reply with you suggestion .
Thanks
1) You can do it with both, actually. If you want to stick with basic HTML forms then you'd be using Payments Standard, and they call it "Subscriptions". You can easily create a Subscription button from within your PayPal account.
If you're using the API then they call it Recurring Payments (or Recurring Billing). You would use Express Checkout for the PayPal signups, and Payments Pro if you want to handle credit cards directly on your site without any redirect to PayPal.
IPN is useful regardless of what integration method you're using, however, don't get it confused with PDT. PDT sends data back to your site's thank you page, or whatever final page you setup for it, and it only works with Payments Standard. When PDT is configured on Payments Standard, even with Auto-Return enabled, there is no guarantee the user will make it back to your return URL. IPN is very similar, but data will always be POSTed to your IPN listener regardless of whether or not the user makes it back to your site.
You'll also want to use IPN to handle updates for future payments on a subscription / recurring profile. For example, the actual payments, cancelations, suspensions, reactivations, etc.
The notify_url parameter you mentioned is used for IPN. Again, though, this is separate from PDT. A common mistake I've seen many times is when people have their PDT and IPN both set to the same URL. Then when people do make it back to your thank you page, the code actually runs twice. Once from the user actually hitting it, and once again from PayPal's IPN server hitting it. So make sure to avoid that sort of thing.
3) No, you will never save credit card details to your server. The subscription / recurring system handles that using the data that PayPal saves on their servers.
I'm currently trying to implement a mechanism whereby i can return a customer to a success page containing an activated PIN allowing access to a piece of software. The process is a straight forward PIN purchase without any kind of user accounts or login system involved.
I have the payment buttons and IPN script in place and working fine, but this only allows me to email the PIN after a successful payment via the IPN script, since of course the two sessions are completely separate to maintain security.
My problem with this is that i can't be sure the customer has access to the same email they used to pay with via Paypal. I had the idea of asking the user to enter which email they would like the PIN sent to prior to the Paypal redirection and then sending it as a custom value.. but then came visions of a mammoth backlog of support emails where users have entered the wrong email. I would really like to be able to redirect to a success page containing the PIN.
Thanks in advance.
I would recommend using the Express Checkout API. The payer experience is very similar to standard payment buttons, however, the user is always guaranteed to return back to your site, so you can display whatever you want on your final page.
That documentation can be a little scary, but it's really just a matter of utilizing 3 API calls.
SetExpressCheckout - This is used to setup a new transaction and will return a token that you'll append to the end of a redirect URL to PayPal. The user is sent to PayPal, they login and agree to pay, and are then sent back the ReturnURL that you specify in this request.
GetExpressCheckoutDetails - Now back on your site/application, you use this API to obtain information about the buyer like their shipping address, address status, payer status, payer ID, etc. You will need the Payer ID for the final API call.
DoExpressCheckoutPayment - This is very similar to the SetExpressCheckout request, but no transaction is completed until this call is completed. Only then does the money move.
Again, those final calls are done on your site so you can use the API response data to update your database and display details on the final page however you want to.
Keep in mind that payments could still be pending for one reason or another, so you'll want to check the status (returned in the DECP response) and display appropriate information on the final page.
IPN's will still be triggered with Express Checkout so you can adjust the IPN script to handle pending payments or anything else you may want to automate outside the checkout flow.
If you happen to be working with PHP my class library for PayPal will make these calls very quick and easy for you.
After adding stuff in shopping cart, clicking some Pay Now with PayPal button, and successful PayPal payment (PP or CC), it is logically possible that a user stays on PayPal website, if for example the Auto Return option isn't activated (or it is but it doesn't work because the user is a guest user without PP account)
The user can return to the site by clicking a link, but doesn't have to. My question is: if he doesn't, how will the site owner be aware that the user paid so that he can now send the items by post? That the site owner gets informed of being paid seems elemental to me, so I find incomprehensible that such elemental thing be left to some obscure Auto-Return option.
Please can somebody explain this to me?
This is a common challenge with any redirected payment gateway, and it's the reason most (if not all) of them implement some sort of asynchronous notification that a payment has been completed. In PayPal, this is the Instant Payment Notification (IPN). You must setup on your site either a generic IPN listener that you link to from your PayPal account profile settings or you can create a more targeted IPN listener specifically for your transactions and use the NOTIFYURL (or related) parameter in the form or API request you use to redirect to PayPal to send IPNs to that listener.
In my integrations, I never perform any order update or transaction logging when the customer returns from the site, preferring instead to wait for the IPN that I can validate and ensure came from PayPal as opposed to a spoofed return from someone trying to hack my checkout process.
For more information, see the IPN documentation: https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/ipn/integration-guide/IPNIntro
Paypal provide IPN for this purpose through which we paypal send request asynchronous to your site and you can perform whichever action you want
I think the point may have been missed here. Or a problem does exist. If the purchaser uses CC, even if you have IPN set up and it works, but if the purchaser uses CC and does not click a button on the last page, which is not presented when using PP account, it is possible for the funds to go through, but no IPN, and so your website is unaware of the purchase. This last page, is an extra page that CC user gets after the page with the Pay button on it.
In this state, you can even go into IPN history, and the IPN is there, says it is sent, but it hasn't been. It does not get sent until after the purchaser clicks the button on the extra page and then they are taken to the auto return page.
I need to track user payments on my site, but there is nothing in an IPN that I have been able to link to my original payment.
Some people suggested using the "custom" field (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11251109/paypal-button-sending-custom-variable-through-ipn), but that doesn't seem to be an option through the Adaptive Payments API.
So are there any fields I can attach to my Pay API call or my SetPaymentOptions API call that will a) be invisible to the user, and b) come back in the IPN so I can track the payment?
My only other options are to either track with the paykey (but that seems wrong since it is public and expires and a given transaction can have several paykeys), or to send the ipn notification to a tracked url such as www.example.com/payments/ipn/{transaction_id}
I'm just fairly shocked if there's no legitimate way for me to track a payment.
I think this could be of use to you:
https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/forums/mobile/how-fetch-invoice-data-using-adaptive-payments-api
I currently have a simple Paypal button on my website where people enter some information which is saved into a database, and the button then takes them to paypal to pay £20 to join. The problem is there is no link between the website and paypal, so I have to manually cross check who has joined on the website against Paypal each time.
I've looked into Paypal IPN which looks ideal, but I can't work out how to match the transactions up.
i.e. IPN sends me a txn_id, but I don't have that at my end. I need a way to send a generate & save a unique ID per transaction, that goes to Paypal with the user, and Paypal then sends back to me via IPN.
I'm quite lost in Paypals shoddy docs, so any help from SO would help!
(Off topic rant: why to Paypal have so many domains: paypal.com, paypal-business.com, x.com, paypal-marketing.com,... Can they not spell phishing?!)
Pass YOUR id (like the DB row id) to Paypal with custom variable, you can cross reference it using the custom variable from IPN.
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_IPNandPDTVariables