I have been hunting around developer.paypal.com for a couple of days now and have the gist of what I need. But I am still looking on the best way to accomplish my task.
What I need is a way for people to pay a fee for an event from my website. I would prefer to allow Guest Checkout as not all attendees will likely have a paypal account yet. But what I would really like is for the paypal website to handle all of checkout. In ebay, you see the total, a small summary and you pay for it right there. I have looked at express checkout, and it wants to return the user to my website to finalize everything.
So in short:
Allow guest checkout
Show payment total on Paypal webpage
Allow payment to be finalized and 'Captured' from PayPal's website, only coming back to my page to say Thanks.
And if possible, not require an address of the attendee
Can this be done?
I have long used StackOverflow for answers, but I am having a hard time finding this answer (mainly because I don't know exactly what I am looking for).
Thanks in advance
You are describing "standard", and the HTML button integration will be much easier than Express Checkout.
Express Checkout is the most robust API to use. The "return" to your site is a good thing, to give the customer the ability to click a final "Place Order" button. But you can also have this triggered automatically on return -- just run DoExpressCheckout without user interaction and display a thank you / confirmation message. If you are going to run DoEC w/o interaction, your initial redirect to PayPal.com should have &useraction=commit appended to the URL. Then, the final button at PayPal.com will say "Pay Now" instead of the default "Continue"
To allow guest checkout with EC, pass SOLUTIONTYPE=Sole in the initial SetEC call. Note that when customers load a PayPal.com checkout page, it checks their browser cookies to see if they have a PayPal email address stored. If they have one stored in the browser, the top "Log in to PayPal" section will be expanded. If they do not have an address stored -- generally meaning this is a brand new computer or they've never used a PayPal account to check out on this one before -- then the bottom guest checkout section will be expanded.
To not require an address, pass NOSHIPPING=1.
Related
I have rolled out my own shopping cart website in PHP, and I want to add a "Pay Now" button which:
Sends the user to Paypal with a total amount payable
Allows the user to pay with or without a paypal account of their own
Prevent user from hacking around with the final amount (e.g. plain text attributes in HTML)
and I want a solution where I do not pay any monthly Paypal fees. But I'm finding the Paypal documentation seriously confusing, as well as other SO questions:
Paypal: Paypal Button Manager overview
SO: Paypal Pay Now Button
SO: php basic pay now button for paypal
SO: PayPal: express checkout pay without account
The Paypal documentation suggests that if I want a "Pay Now" button, the only option I have is to use "Hosted Sole Solution only". What exactly does this mean?
It also says "You cannot use hosted buttons with Hosted Sole Solution; you should use token buttons instead." Please forgive the stupid question, but this means if I want a Paypal "Pay Now" button, I have to use the "Hosted Sole Solution", which always uses "Tokens"? How exactly does the "Token" scheme work? Other questions suggest data is sent in plain text so can be hacked around with, yet the concept of tokens seems to suggest otherwise?
And last but not least, are there any examples of PHP code for the "Pay Now" button? I'm mystified why it all has to be so confusing!! (I'm comfortable with PHP, but to really understand how the Paypal "Pay Now" system works, examples would be ideal)
In case it matters, I will also want to use Paypal IPN, but I have done this before, so will regard it as a separate task, unless it has to be considered for the "Pay Now" button.
The big factor here is going to be the fact that you do not want to pay a monthly fee. This will limit you to using PayPal Payments Standard / Express Checkout, both of which have no monthly cost.
PayPal Standard are your "Pay now" buttons. They are nothing more than an HTML post form and can be created within your PayPal account's button factory, or you can create your own forms.
PayPal Express Checkout is an API based solution which in the absence of a shopping cart platform will perform nearly identically to PayPal Standard. Express Checkout does not allow the customer to checkout as a guest by default, additional variables (solutiontype=sole) need to be passed with the initial API call.
It sounds to me like PayPal Standard is going to be the product you are after. Here is a link to the base "developer" guide for PayPal Standard:
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/integration/web/
If you prefer to create the buttons through the PayPal system, login to your PayPal account, click 'Profile' in the top right, then select "My Selling Tools". Select "Update" next to "PayPal Buttons" and then click on Create New Button on the right side. The button builder is really a simple tool and will provide you with a complete HTML form to paste into your site's source.
It turns out that what I wanted is the Express Checkout:
Getting Started with Express Checkout
I'm creating a really small website where I'll sell some products.
I need this website to show the available products, the users can add to the cart, and pay at the end, then I'll send the product for them by my self. It's a really small business.
I was taking a look at the paypal options and I didn't understand very well how it works.
For what I understand, with a free account I can only use their buttons, but I can't have a dynamic solution where I can manage my products on my website (look's like I need to add the products information like name and price on their website ).
What I wanted to do was just use my own website to handle this very simple store/products, and at the end, the user click on a CheckOut button, and Then I redirect the user to a paypal page where they can pay for the total value and then paypal redirect them back to me ( as a free account or at least with the 5$ account ).
Is that possible?
By the way I'm using CakePHP to build that, and I already have the website built with this framework, and to build what I need it's more than enough, I don't really need any solution like magento or others eCommerce platform.
Thank you.
If you use Paypal's free account then your visitor will leave your website, go to Paypal's website to make the payment, and then return to your website. Paypals paid version allows you to keep your visitor on your page, but you have to program you site to work with their API. Plus the cost can add up. Paypal also has other service other than just buttons. For instance they have a shopping cart too, but here again your vistor will leave your website to go to Paypals site to add the items to the shopping cart.
Another company that you might want to look at is https://stripe.com/ here you keep the vistor on your site as well as only paying per transaction rather than a monthly fee like at Paypal.
If you want to manage your items and inventory from your website and not enter everything into buttons at PayPal.com, I would suggest that you use Express Checkout. Express Checkout is also a free service and allows you to send all of the payments details to PayPal via API and PayPal will authenticate and allow your buyers to select shipping details. The user can then be redirected back to your website to complete their order.
You can find additional information here: https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/express-checkout/gs_expresscheckout
Thanks,
I got a simple Digital Goods Checkout to work in Sandbox mode. I have a "Pay with PayPal" button that I can click which pops up an window for logging into PayPal. After that it redirects me to my purchasemade.php script, and from there I can successfully download a file.
My problem is that on my website I'm going to sell many products, so I need to know which product they want to download when they finish the purchase. Each product has a unique ID, so I thought I'd pass that ID as the item number in the HTML form as a hidden field named "item_number". However, I don't know how to read that value once I reach the purchasemade.php.
How do I read values passed in POST in the original form? Otherwise, what's the best way of identifying a product? I'm using PHP as my scripting language for this project.
If you're going to stick with Payments Standard I would recommend using IPN to deliver your digital goods. You could use PDT (which is very similar to IPN) to send order data back to the page the user gets redirected to, however, there is no guarantee they will make here even with Auto-Return enabled in your PayPal account.
Alternatively, you could use the Express Checkout API instead of Payments Standard. This method guarantees the user will make it back to your site prior to completing payment. This will allow you to utilize session variables so you can present the download to the user on the thank you/receipt page.
Still, though, I think IPN would be your best bet regardless of which way you go. You can use it to auto-deliver the digital goods, send out general email notifications, update your database, hit third party web services, etc. all in real-time.
Hey everyone! I was hoping to start using Magento for a very simple checkout landing page. I have a few questions regarding the capabilities of Magento:
1) I don't actually want to use the 'add to cart' button but rather a 'buy it now' button. So when a user clicks to purchase a product it automatically takes you to the checkout process. Does anyone know if this is possible to configure with Magento?
2) If I purchase an SSL certificate from somewhere like verisign.com can I keep users on my domain through the check out process? I'd also be willing to use something such as Google Checkout if it were possible to customize the look of the Google skin to match my site.
3) Is Google Check out like PayPal in that I transfer money from Google Checkout to a designated bank account?
Thanks all. Any help is greatly appreciated.
1.) Yes, it is possible. You could write a module to observe an event (perhaps checkout_cart_product_add_after) and automatically re-route the user to the checkout page.
2.) The SSL doesn't matter when it comes to keeping someone on your site. (If you checkout users on your site, you will need an SSL). The kicker is what payment gateway you utilize. Some payment gateways will require the user to enter payment information through a different domain than your own.
3.) As for how Google checkout works, I'm not sure. I have never known anyone to actually use it. Most people I know just use authorize.net. I'm sure you can easily find more information just by Googling it.
I want to achieve something like this
http://depositfiles.com/en/gold/payment.php
I have normal users signed up. I want them to upgrade to premium user. Once a person pays, how do I know which user he was signed in ? How do i force the user to login first before being able to click the paypal button and make payment ? Otherwise, I would receive money, but wouldn't know which user to mark as "PAID" in my database.
when you click on the paypal button, it redirects you to the paypal page where you can login and pay.
I also want to accept Visa and Mastercards, is it doable through paypal using the same method ?
Paypal's information can be found here:
Part 1
You can create a subscribe button for each type of subscription you want and use the HTML variables in Part 2 to enable you to know what type of product and what user is included in the invoice.
This needs a lot more details than you currently provide. What language have you written your website in? Static HTML? Ruby? PHP? How does PayPal's payment system work?
normally the way it will work is that your site will pass information to paypal (http://paypal.sourceforge.net/ is one toolkit that seems to be made for php, thought I've never used it so I can't really promise its not abandonware).
once the paypal transaction is completed successfully, control is passed back to your site. you can then set the user's flag in your database as a premium user.
as far as I can tell, you tell paypal to handle payments for you, and the user picks a funding source in paypal. if you want to have visa/mastercard separately handled from paypal you'll need another payment gateway to handle it, like mirapay or something else.