I just wanted to ask among the gurus here if anyone has ever attempted to test a complete transaction from start to end on an ecommerce site using paypal or any other epayment gateway.
Please guys, I would appreciate any thoughts and comments. As it is a live site, I cant use the sandbox as that will negatively impact sales. However my firm is a startup and so can't afford the complete transaction and refund process that was suggested [here]:Accepting dummy credit cards on a live site with ActiveMerchant & PayPal.
Please help!
Previously I tested by buying low cost items from myself - that way you're only paying commission and you're getting most of the moneyback.
Admittedly you need 2 Paypal accounts, but that shouldn't be a problem, and you should only have to 'kick the tyres' in the live environment because all your testing will have been done in the dev environment.
We had a similar problem during startup and still use this process in the live site. We have specific "test" products that we purchase using a live credit card, then monitor the transactions: purchase, decline purchase, subscription (recurring billing), cancel, refund, etc.
Our test product is priced very low (5 cents). For subscriptions, the billing interval is 1 day, for a maximum of 3 intervals (with a free trial period of 1 day). This allows me to run a full test/validation, including recurring billing, in the live environment in less than a week.
We refund all charges following the test, which puts the money back on the credit card (or back in the PayPal account). Because of the refunding, our sales impact is zero (offsetting sale and refund). It does cost us a small non-refundable PayPal fee for each transaction, but that amounts to $1 or less.
These "test" products are not exposed to normal users. Also, we manually verify any "test" sales to make sure they are part of our internal testing.
"Sandbox" testing is the way to go during development, but a periodic test in the live environment is necessary to be verify that nothing is amiss.
Why not use a real credit card, then give yourself a refund? The commision fee is returned in that case.
All the time that I want to test our live sites we use a real credit card.
Thanks
I don't understand why you can't use the sandbox..?? How would using it negatively impact your sales? It's all fake.
Just setup your own sandbox.yourdomain.com version of your site and use that as your test server. Configure it to use PayPal's sandbox with sandbox API credentials, etc. This will allow you to go all the way through an order process and test everything from the UI stuff to payment processing, API requests/response processing, IPN, etc.
When everything is working you sync it up with your live server, which is hitting the live PayPal server, of course.
Again, I don't see how that would impact you in any way other than being a successful testing solution..??
Related
Need help.. My query is as follows
I have my e-commerce website up and running with all the products. People are visiting my website and they are unable to complete the checkout process because there is no payment gateway setup yet , due to some delay in the bank process the gateway is still not setup.
I did try the cash on delivery process but it resulted in a huge loss to me.
I wanted to know if it is possible to send an email confirmation to the customer with the order details, price and my bank details to which they can deposit the amount during checkout process in opencart.
You can use the "Bank Transfer" details for that, but it's essentially the same as what you've got with COD. The easiest thing to do is just set up another payment gateway such as paypal etc. There are hundreds of them available (other than the ones that come as standard).
hope this helps for you and got an idea.
For my experience, depositing the money to the bank by the customer is a indeed huge waste of time. They shop online for the convenience of not going out or what.
For your question:
Try to search cybersource as they are our payment gateway and they are really secure.
I suggest, since you don't yet the payment gateway, upon checkout, inform the customer what will be the mode of payment that they are using - like Credit Cart, Cash-On-Delivery or thru PayPal.
I think there is still no module that requires your need but you should work now on getting the payment gateway done as it will really help you save time and money.
Once you complete your payment gateway, try to establish Shipping method: Pick up from the store, Free Shipping when within your country and thru Shipping Delivery Service like DHL, FedEx, AmEx, etc.
Good Luck.
I'm considering using either PayPal's adaptive payments or Stripe (depending on setup time) for a new web application! I've heard the approval process can take weeks with PayPal but I'm hoping this isn't the case. Can anyone answer the following questions for me;
Can I use adaptive Payments with a standard business account?
Does the account need to be verified and if so, how long does this take?
What if anything can I do to speed the process up?
1) Yes.
2) Yes. Verification can be instant if you have an online banking account compatible with PayPal's verification system. Otherwise you have to wait for them to deposit to small amounts into your account and then verify those amounts once you see them, which can take a few days depending on your bank.
3) Get all of your specs worked out and a demo put together on the PayPal sandbox, and then submit everything very clearly to PayPal when you do the application for you App ID. As long as everything is pretty straight forward they've been auto-approving apps pretty much instantly. If you have something unique about your application that they need to look into further it can take a few days to get done depending on the details.
Keep in mind that Stripe is credit cards only. PayPal Adaptive Payments is the whole PayPal wallet aspect of things, with credit card payments available through "guest checkout."
There are advantages and disadvantages to both. If I knew more about your application plans I could give you a better recommendation on which one you should go with, but I can tell you right now PayPal wins in almost every instance, in my opinion.
I'm a freelancer and I'm negotiating with a potential client for a full e-commerce website using PayPal Payment Pro.
They want to list and sell everything from cheap fittings/fixtures to very expensive furniture on there new website.
It's a BIG job, and everything would be designed and developed bespoke. Right now were at the £2,500 mark, but I don't think they're going to agree... However, I had a thought.
They make a great profit just from instore sales. I'd be happy to reduce the design/development price by 50% (to possibly 65%) if they agree to give me 3% to 5% of all online sales.
My question is, how would I do this with PayPal Payment Pro?
I can record all online sales and invoice them for 3% to 5% each month, but I'd rather it be done automatically. I can't find any documentation on how to do this, any ideas?
What I would recommend is integrating Express Checkout and Pro into the website like usual, and then install Instant Payment Notification on the server to automate payments from the website owner to you.
Within the IPN script you can setup a Pay API request that submits the payment from the website owner's account to your account accordingly. You can calculate your commission from within this based on the order total and push the funds to your account.
IPN occurs in real-time (or at least generally very close to it) so the procedure would be completely automated at that point and you would get your commission payments immediately when each order goes through.
I.e. user clicks buy, I authorize their card and wait 2 weeks and see if enough users have pre ordered a given product before charging them and shipping.
I'd like the following -
To avoid pci compliance I'd prefer to whisk users off to paypal for getting c.c. details.
progmatically reauthorizing any preorders and capturing funds is fine after 2 weeks. But for my prototype doing this via the paypal account dashboard is fine.
my app being notified when a user successfully preorders (ie. there card is authorized by paypal) in order to update my "preorder" counter on the site.
For my prototype I want to avoid as much coding on this so offloading as much as possible to paypal, even if it means I have to manually handle reauthorizations and payment captures is actually better in the short term.
Can paypal uk provide this functionality and if so which business solution is this? standard or pro?
You should be able to do this with standard; However considering that you eventually would want a "tighter" integration with your back-end systems and, it might be a good idea to start with pro itself.
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
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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.