Does anyone else find that the documentation of a lot of payment processors have poor or incomplete documentation as to how to use their API? Or it's just plain confusing?
Recently I have setup both PayPal and Beanstream and found that both are either confusing or don't include full documentation.
For example, in the BeanStream documentation, they say they will return a "message_id", which is great, but no where do they tell you what the different id's mean. It also comes with some text, so you can start creating a list, but there is no way to check to ensure you get either a valid one or the one that means it was successful.
Has anyone had this experience?
Edit: I will agree that when you email them they are helpful, but unfortunately most of them are only open normal business hours for general tech support (other than emergency) which isn't always useful as that isn't when it seems like I do my integration.
well, this isn't really specific to payment processor documentation, in that, all things being equal, well documented APIs will help encourage development. for what it's worth, i've worked with paypal, authorize.net, ups, and usps APIs, and didn't find them overtly confusing (not implying that they were a particular joy to get through).
that being said, i wish more documentation was like PHP's. despite it being such a scattered language, the documentation is really quite good.
Having worked with a lot of APIs, not only for payment processors but for lots of other ecommerce related web services, I have to say to that while the docs can be less than stellar, they usually aren't that bad, and if you send them an email or give them a call, they will usually be pretty helpful.
I have found the documentation and code examples from Authorize.net and Nova's ViaKlix very helpful. I stay away from PayPal.
This may not be much help to you, but as you get more an more experienced w/in particular domain the interfaces get easier. By weird twist of world, I've coded a whole bunch of credit card interfaces, and once you kind of get the lingo they all work the same.
The only other suggestion I would offer is to avail yourself of support resources in addition too the documentation provided. We recently worked with a relatively well known payment gateway, and while their documentation completely sucked (by their own admission as well), the support staff was incredibly knowledgable and more than willing to help out/explain.
I've used Realex and PayPal. Realex documentation is fine. Clear and straightforward. PayPal's is absolutely eye-bleedingly horrible. And I'm the kind of weirdo who enjoys reading documentation so much I've been known to read it for fun (I've read through the entire OpenID specificiation, even though I have no immediate plans to use it).
I've only worked with PayPal, but the simple version (where you just set up an HTML form on your web page and submit it with the PayPal button) is super-easy to work with. And if you're looking for near real-time payment feedback, I always found it easier to just write a program to check my PayPal email account periodically, and parse payment details from the body of the email itself.
I've had to use Authorize.net for several sites and the supplied documentation is 'just ok' assuming you are working in the somewhat limited technology sets that they supply sample code for. It was a breeze to get it up and running with PHP but considerably lacking when trying to pull off the same thing in ColdFusion.
Several other sites done via PayPal which IMO was a much better experience.
PayPal is a nightmare when it comes to setting up and testing the test account (Sandbox).
Re: Beanstream you have to login then you'll see the documentation link on the left hand side.
The design is so '90s and they recommend using IE.
Re: Paypal I adapted this code from http://www.php-suit.com/paypal for my Zend Framework project.
Note: you've got to have ssl:// socket transport wrapper registered otherwise (visible in phpinfo()) you'll have to tweak the code to use curl.
Here is how to get the code using SVN
svn checkout http://paypalphp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ paypalphp-read-only
Related
I have a site making calls to the PayPal sandbox. This has worked fine in the past. Today, all of my calls are returning INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR. I am using the Node.js paypal-rest-sdk module to make these calls.
The debug ID of the transactions are 38ddafc521580, bc93a6d0f3b60, and fb3f7b74697c9.
On a related note - I don't see anywhere on PayPal developer support where you can directly ask for help with these issues; PayPal seems to just point to StackOverflow. Is that correct? Seems like I should just be able to log into the PayPal developer portal and ask for help with specific debug IDs, or at least see some more detail for those transactions on why they failed. Using StackOverflow for this doesn't feel "right" to me...
UPDATE: An update was pushed out just now that should resolve most of the external issues. Can you all please let me know if you are still seeing problems? There are a few outstanding problems in the cleanup, so I want to make sure they aren't impacting anything.
Full disclosure: I work at PayPal
I just ran a test against sandbox and have confirmed that there appears to be some downtime. I've notified the sandbox team of the problem and have provided your (and my) debug ids for them to take a look. We're on it and will hopefully have a resolution shortly.
From the support side, you're correct, there is no forum system for technical integration issues. For problems with downtime, you can report those to the technical support team at https://www.paypal-techsupport.com/app/ask/session/L3RpbWUvMTQ1OTM0NzAxNi9zaWQvVC00anZNTW0%3D, or contact support directly from https://www.paypal.com/selfhelp/home. You can always reach out to the merchant technical support Twitter handle at https://twitter.com/paypal_mts as well.
For integration troubles, that's where SO would be best, where we can help work through code issues.
The server errors have gone away, but they've been accompanied by a massive uptick in customers getting a message that reads "the card you entered cannot be used for this payment". So they're still not able to make payments. We had the first couple contact PayPal, but we've gotten so many that it seems like it's not a coincidence. Do we really need to refer people to PayPal (which will cause them grief, surely, and cause PayPal to get a bunch of extra calls) or is there still something going on?
I have a use case in which we need to transfer funds from our merchant account to our customer local bank.
I found paypal legacy api which says it can make ach transfers.
I want to know how secure is using this legacy api and whether this is supported anymore or not.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Yes, it still works fine and will continue to work for a very long time. Too many solutions up-and-running on it for them to dump it, and it's also still much more mature (loaded with more features) than REST. They continue to add new features, too, so for REST to catch up it's going to a while.
REST API still needs lot of features, so I don't think that they will shut Classic API down soon.
Does anyone know how to test the callback for In-App Currency Offers that were just released by facebook other than completing the offers themselves? As I need to see if my modifications are correct before I use them on a live app.
Facebook does not provide a code sample or even a clear explanation on how to test.
Unfortunately, there is no option for sending a test callback or anything like that - especially maddening because TrialPay does (or at least used to) offer this functionality for non-Facebook integrations of their product.
There are free offers & surveys, which are somewhat unreliable in their own right, but may be preferable to actually spending money - kinda depends on how much you value your time. Sure, this is less than ideal, but it's what we've got.
I decided to look into using Google Identity Toolkit. I knew I liked the UI, and the idea of using a "federated" login system. I'm now having my doubts, as while my site works well with gmail/ymail/hotmail etc, it doesn't seem to support any of the social platforms.
Essentially, I just need an email address from people to be registered with the site, so I thought GITKit was the perfect solution.
Should I have gone down a custom route (like stackoverflow?), or have I missed some of the GITKit documentation?
Any help would be much appreciated.
I did do a fair amount of googling prior to posting that question. However, I have come accross some answers. Rather than delete my post - I guess I should share the information. If others thought the information was clear, please delete this thread!
Firstly, there is a page identifying how to add custom IDP's: https://sites.google.com/site/gitooldocs/customidps
There is also a sample site (http://www.openidsamplestore.com/localmapping/) which uses facebook.
How does the advanced demo work for identity providers who are not
E-mail providers, such as social networks?
The hardest part about
designing the advanced site was to find a way to handle all the
edge-cases that can happen with these types of identity providers.
Google previously published a summary of best-practices for
account-linking that describes why these types of identity providers
are so much harder to support. However this demo provides a user
self-service mechanism for all the tricky cases to avoid the costs
that a website might otherwise occur if those users contact a customer
support representative.
Finally, a best practices run-down is available here:
https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin/loginlogic
EDIT 1 :
If that identity provider asserts email addresses that it does not
host, we suggest you also implement additional account linking logic.
A future version of GITKit will add support for these type of
identity providers, such as social networks, which will avoid the need
to implement that logic
Perhaps GITKit is the future after-all... Would be nice to have an idea of the time-frame in which this support will be added though...
EDIT 2 :
Direct from the horses mouth (Eric Sachs # Google - Source Link):
That feature is not expected to be generally available in 2011. We
are shooting for Q1 2012
Looks like someone got it working back in Dec 2011 but there is still an outstanding issue with mapping the id returned to an email address. It was probably resolved:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-identity-toolkit/facebook/google-identity-toolkit/2218yW4zXw8/28X7btJEh_sJ
Here is the documentation for the sample store including brief info on basic, mobile and advanced mode (using facebook):
https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/Home/openidsamplesite
An out-of-the-box IDP for facebook and twitter has not yet been released.
I've done quite a bit of searching for a CMS platform or robust framework that will perhaps facilitate the management of signup and subscriptions right of the box with a Twilio tie in.
Thus far I've only been successful at finding how many startups have been funded by the Twilio fund, who's building the nextgen voice enabled app, and various other things of that nature vs any real meat. Seems that there's a dearth of meaningful information without applying a plethora of negative google filters to reduce matches and even then it's still not giving anything real meaningful wrt my search.
So, I'm hoping that someone may have a better eye on the lay of the Twilio landscape as far as already existent systems go that can handle the bulk of needs that exist for a "regular" CMS esque site that needs to also handle subscriptions and e-commerce related tasks.
Hitherto I've just planned to build something out myself, but I wanted to do a sanity check before I spend a lot of time that could perhaps be obviated.
My suggestion would be to find a CMS that does everything you want (except the twilio links), on the platform you want, and then just add the Twilio stuff in. Twilio is simple to use, and should be simple to add-on to most open source CMS's. It'll probably be the easiest part of the project....