I was wondering, if you have coded a website which uses paypal payments as a payment method (the kind of payments where you get redirected to their site for payment, not web payment pro).
What kind of details can I store? Is it just their paypal email address that can get supplied to me or do other details regarding their paypal account also get sent to me via their API which can be stored on my site?
As already mentioned, you get the details of the transaction, so email address, name, delivery address and the contents of the shopping cart.
You can send custom parameters from your form though, such as phone number.
Paypal, by default doesn't ask users to provide a phone number and therefore usually doesn't send you one. However, it's often useful for retailers to have a customers phone number.
If your shopping cart is populated by your website and then customers are asked to complete a brief, name, phone number, email form before submitting to Paypals site you can send these extra form fields to Paypal and have them come back to your server for storage/checking.
However... I found it very erratic! There seemed to be a problem with my account when I did this and the PP technical team couldn't explain why it was only sometimes working! I gave up in the end and found a Payment gateway with credit card and Paypal integration, now all my payments come through the same channel and callback methods regardless of type.
http://www.securehosting.com I use now.
Mostly only the details pertaining to the transaction can be retrieved in the usual procedure, as it appears even when you see the transaction details in your paypal account when you receive payments. However, it would be helpful for you if you can provide more information on what you wish to look for.
Related
I am generating a payout with PayPal to different people. These people provide access to us to their PayPal information to retrieve the necessary information to make the payout. So I am using two different things from PayPal:
Payouts.
Log in with PayPal.
To avoid problems when the user change their PayPal email address I am trying to use the recipient type "PAYPAL_ID" when I make the payout. But I have problem to retrieve this information when the user log in with PayPal.
I see the field "PAYER_ID" in this web site from PayPal but in the list of scopes to retrieve each field I don't found the scope for this field.
How can I retrieve this field from PayPal?
Thanks!!!
The problem was in PayPal, for some reason the Sandbox didn't return the PAYER_ID. They updated something in their systems.
I want to verify that whether user has entered valid Paypal id or not. If not than user can't do registration. I've also visited this [1]: How can I verify a PayPal ID? question but it doesn't help me :(
You can't find a direct answer because "valid PayPal ID" doesn't have a single fixed meaning. You will need to be more specific as to what you are trying to discover. Then there may or may not be a way to accomplish what you want, since PayPal protects some aspects of their customers' account and identity information for their protection (and for business reasons).
A bit of background that may help you clarify your question, if not necessarily answer it:
Any email (or phone number) can be configured to receive PayPal payments, in many cases even if the email was not attached to a PayPal account at the time the payment was sent. However, not all PayPal products can function in this way (e.g. you cannot make API calls as an account that has not been set up and has not generated API credentials). Are you asking about receiving money, and if so with which product(s)?
Most people can pay through PayPal if sent to a PayPal page, whether they are accountholders or not (depending upon the PayPal product being used). In addition to guest payments and/or direct credit card payments through PayPal, people can set up PayPal accounts when they arrive and immediately pay with them. So collecting email first and refusing to go forward if there is no PayPal account attached to that email would loose you potential customers. It would also "let through" many customers who could not pay, such as people who know an email address but don't own the attached PayPal account. PayPal also intentionally declines to easily answer questions about whether an email has an associated PayPal account in order to make it harder for bad actors to accumulate lists of PayPal accounts (often with associated personal information) for spear phishing campaigns. There are some APIs that allow you to get limited information about a PayPal account but there are limits associated with these APIs; see e.g. GetVerifiedStatus documentation at:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/adaptive-accounts/GetVerifiedStatus_API_Operation/
Note also that Verified has a particular technical meaning in PayPal, and is NOT AT ALL THE SAME as "able to pay you."
If you want to know if someone can log into their PayPal account, and then use that PayPal account to get information about the user (as well as potentially pay you), that's easy: use Login with PayPal. That's what it's for. Naturally this requires the user to login and assent to your use of their information.
If you want to know if someone can take a particular action (e.g. make a payment), at this moment, the only way to be certain is to actionally request that action. You have options short of actually requesting money; if you want to ensure the user has funds and reserve them for you to collect shortly you can request an authorization rather than a sale. If you want to make sure the user can log in, has payment mechanisms and generally looks ready to pay you (but WITHOUT reserving and guaranteeing funds) you can request an Order.
Hopefully one of these things is what you are asking for?
If you have a PayPal AccountID (a PayPal-generated ID rather than an externally-generated identifier like email or phone number) you can pass it to certain APIs (such as the GetVerifiedStatus), so many of the same options above apply.
I have integrated PayPal into my website and have the IPN system working successfully. The problem I have now is that unless the PayPal email is the same as the one they used to register on my site, I have no idea who the person is.
I would like to add on my own data to the IPN message such as AccountID=10 or AccountName="SomeName" so that I can identify who the person is for my own user base since it is selling of virtual goods and privileges and not shipping to some address. Can this be done?
You certainly can send many parameters such as invoice parameter with your Paypal IPN request and get it returned with IPN response.
Full parameters list is available here:
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNandPDTVariables/
You could also make this a non-issue by setting it up so your customers use their PayPal login credentials to log into your site. Have a look at the following documentation:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/direct/identity/log-in-with-paypal/
I am about to set up an IPN script after users make a purchase from my site but I just had a thought, what if the email address they signed up to my site with differs from the email address they signed up to PayPal with?
i.e. they sign up to my site with forename.surname#domain.com but their PayPal account login is surname.forename#domain.com.
The PayPal IPN will send back surname.forename#domain.com and I have no way to identify who has just made that purchase.
I realise in this simple case it may be possible to find an email address similar to that in the database but in the real world people have crazy email addresses and that isn't always going to be possible.
Has anyone solved this problem before?
It may be best to use a different identifier such as an invoice number or pass a custom value to PayPal for the payment. PayPal will return this via IPN and can be used to link the payment to the customer's account on your website.
This way you pass a value to PayPal that is linked back to that customer's account regardless of their PayPal account details.
Hope this helps!
I suggest that you should force the customers log in before placing an order, then you can get the email they used in Paypal from the return value, and combine the two emails in some way or even just leave them.
I'm building a web application and I would like that each user could configure their necessary information about their PayPal accounts in order to receive payments from the app. Can this be done?
I've seen a website that asks each user to type their PayPal email in order to receive payments, but I don't know what I have to do programmatically in order to use that user's account information so that person receives the payment.
Thanks,
Brian
Yes, it is possible to do this using PayPal Website Payments integration. Essentially your client needs to set their PayPal account up to receive payments, this usually requires them to prove that they're a legitimate business, although charities and some other personal reasons for taking payments such as wedding gifts are allowed as well.
Once setup they will be given a unique vendor id which can be embedded into a form on your website. When a customer wants to purchase something, this vendor id is passed to paypal and they handle the transaction from there. This means you don't have to store any credit card information on your website.
Check out the PayPal Website integration guide here: https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/pdf/PP_WebsitePaymentsStandard_IntegrationGuide.pdf