First i am not sure whether this is the right place to ask this question , but i found couple of donation questions here. So i thought i should ask it on stackoverflow, but if i am wrong please refer me to the correct stack exchange network site.
We are a group of people who are creating web scripts and applications for free downloads, we never charge anyone. But sometimes it's really hard to spend on a project we are not going to earn. So is it a good idea to use paypal donate button on our site or not.
Apart from me and some of my fellows we have some other volunteers as well who have been creating these free web applications so we need some way to encourage them and pay them some little amount for their hard work. As we have no earnings from the site it is not possible to pay them directly.
Can someone suggest a better way to encourage all the contributors as i found that donate button will be helpful . Still i am not sure and do not want to take any wrong steps
Thanks Everyone
I'd recommend Flattr. It's something between PayPal for small donations and a Facebook Like button:
If a user clicks on it, Flattr will remember that website and, at the end of the month, all people "flattred" by that user will receive a certain financial donation from that user. The benefit of this system is that your users only would have to click once to show their support (both morally and financially). Also with Flattr all money a user wishes to spend will reach you (and hopefully also your volunteers), fee's are paid when putting money on your Flattr account.
Due to its (rather high) fees, I would only recommend PayPal if you expect larger donations.
Related
As a developer, I want to know what are the advantages of using PayPal API?
I know there are a ton of APIs out there to use, but if I will use the PayPal API specifically, what are the benefits of it?
Typically people use the PayPal API if they have a business that wants to process payments via PayPal. It's not a developer question.
Your question becomes, really, what are the advantages of processing payments with PayPal? And there may be interesting answers to that question but this isn't the place.
Edit:
Ok I did think of something that can be added from a developer and solutioning perspective
Look at the demo code here
See how easy that is. Now actually click one of the buttons. See how the window emerges, and how quick and natural the payment experience is for the user--with the originating website staying loaded in the background.
Think also about the security of this payment experience. All the buyer's financial instruments are saved and stored at PayPal; nothing is shared with the (potentially new/unfamiliar) ecommerce site they are paying, whereas PayPal is a relatively trusted name by many millions of buyers.
So, TL;DR : it's very easy, it's very quick (no retyping things) and secure, and people trust it enough to actually send you money and hope you will deliver on the new product/service you are offering
I keep reading everywhere that you are REQUIRED to use the (ugly) yellow buttons PayPal provides you with, yet when I go to www.bustedtees.com or www.devtees.com they use their own buttons that then link to the Express Checkout.
Which one is correct?
We use our own buttons on our website and did not have any problems. Buttons are just recommended option for user recognition of familiar button
There are no technical restrictions, and if you want to know if there are formal requirements from PayPal you would need to read their agreements. (Yes I know, reading clickthrough agreements -- who does that?) :). If you violate their terms of service they MIGHT come tell you to change your integration, but probably not.
HOWEVER, one thing to think about: familiar patterns "grease the rails" for users: increase recognition and you increase conversion. This means more people end up buying from you. Those distinctive (and yes, ugly) buttons help people recognize the PayPal checkout option and select it rather than potentially leaving your site because they didn't see a PayPal checkout option, or seeing a button labelled PayPal but being suspicious of it because it "didn't look right."
I know in my personal experience that I have been extremely frustrated trying to pay some sites with PayPal and have left & bought from other places because the checkout was non-obvious (especially when placed on the 35th page of a long checkout process, heh).
But this is backed up not just by personal experience, but market research. PayPal did some market research years ago and the #1 reason that paypal users failed to use PayPal checkout when it was available was that while the person may have seen a PayPal logo, they didn't recognize that they could pay on that site with PayPal because the checkout wasn't immediately familar to them. At that time this was with well-integrated sites that followed all of PayPal's guidelines BUT merchant-site PayPal checkout at that time looked a bit different than on eBay, which was the #1 site on which people pay with PayPal (and still is) -- including a different button.
The difference in conversion rate was STAGGERING, though. Like, more than half the people failed to pay with PayPal because the button was unfamiliar or placed in an unfamiliar location. So consider carefully whether or how much you want to leverage people's existing habits vs showing them something new.... your site may look less ugly but also sell less product.
I'm really having trouble finding out how to set this up. Their documentation is horrendous at best. I called Paypal and told them what I need:
have my own custom shopping cart
client doesn't want to pay monthly fee
I was told that I could use Website Payments Standard to send my cart contents and the user can choose to sign in/pay or simply pay by CC without an account. Every link on their documentation sends me to the silly HTML button creator. I don't need hand-holding through the coding, I just need to know where I can find the proper documentation. I don't want Paypal buttons that send customers to a paypal cart page every time they add something.
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_cart_upload
This is what I was looking for. It only took 3+ hours to find, so congrats to you Paypal. You've stolen my money in the past, now you've stolen my time. Hopefully this helps someone else who was looking for the same thing.
Thanks! I'm looking for a way to implement paypal in my java (spring) server so my clients (or I) can easily setup their webshops. I totally agree that implementing PayPal in a web application should be simple and in reality is a total mess.
So thanks a lot for posting this here, I guess you also saved me some additional time!
Best wishes,
Jochen
Is paypal a suitable system for handling event ticket payments. All I want to do is create a page with event details, a list of hOw many tickets are left and a secure payment handling. Systems like eventwax seem to charge for use of there system and then paypal charges you too. I just dont get why people are paying twice. Also does anyone have any other recommendations for similar sites like eventwax
Google Checkout lets you do something that will work for you. Basically you create a Google Docs spreadsheet that follows a special format and contains the items that you sell and the quantities remaining. Then, you can make an HTML button that you can embed in your page. When a user clicks the button, it processes the selling of a specific item from that spreadsheet. Google handles everything else automatically - it subtracts one from the quantity field in the spreadsheet, processes the payment and sends you an email with the purchase and shipping details. Little to no programming required.
Of course, this can't work with PayPal.
First off, paypal comes in many different flavors. From the simple they host the order form and process payments way on up to all you do is pass them the credit card info and charge amount and they process it.
With that in mind I don't believe they support selling a limited quantity of items. This is something you would have to provide with your site.
Which leaves us with: are you asking a "how do I code this" type of question or something more general. If the former then please provide language and what you have so far. If the latter, then you might try at http://webmasters.stackexchange.com
Now regarding eventwax charging for usage, that is a perfectly legit thing to do. They are providing a service which allows people to sell a limited number of things, ensure that those things aren't over sold (which can be difficult depending on your db transactional experience), and handle payment processing.
All said and done there are really several companies which will get a piece of the action so to speak. Paypal is one, the credit card companies are another. If you are using paypal's payflow pro gateway then there is at least two other companies involved: your bank and the transaction processor themselves.
Which leads us to why people pay companies like event wax. Quite frankly, it's easy they don't have to screw around with programming something, and it works right now. There's a lot that can be said about doing things this way. Usually you just include all of this into the cost of doing business.
I'm trying to integrate a payment mechanism to my site. The scenario that I need is not trivial and can be explained by the following example:
User pays upfront for a subscription program (i.e. receiving Netflix). User is able to make changes to the subscription (i.e. change number of movies checked out each time from 4 to 2)
User is able to buy additional one time purchases via the provider's site (Netflix) supplied by 3rd parties. These items (i.e. popcorn, snacks) get billed to the same credit card as the subscription without having to go through the process of resubmitting the credit card information.
Of course, my site takes also a small fee for the transactions :-)
I was wondering if this is supported by PayPal, Google Checkout or someone else.
Thanks.
The Paypal api can handle all of those processes.
I seem to have dropped the ball on what kind of answer you wanted so I'll leave it at that.
If you have some feedback, more direct questions I will try to answer as much as I can
--
The money would best go through you first, unless somehow you can convince your customers its normal to bill them per item. Also if they pay by credit card you should only bill them once as you would incur fees on every payment. I don't know of anyway to bill once but distribute the payments.
As for the paypal docs..
Very good resource, there is also some sample code for most major web languages
Also this will get you started if you don't have a developer login
Their developer support is also pretty good. One thing a lot of people seem to screw up when starting out with the paypal api is not setting the latest version in the configs so don't forget to update that to the latest release. :)
Disclaimer..
Yea I know there is a lot of bad press about paypal and crazy stuff happening, but they do get the job done most of the time, its not my fault the customers love to use it.