I see many examples of how to display transaction information to a user with PDT. I cannot find a way to associate a Paypal payment with a specified ID so that when the transaction is completed, I can update that ID in the database as paid.
How am I supposed to get an ID that I specify back from Paypal so I know what the payment is for? I cannot use the email address or name or anything else. It must be an ID that I specify.
I see some people using item_number, but I am using a Paypal encrypted button so I cannot add on form variables to post to Paypal when the user clicks the pay now button.
I see this on websites all the time, so I know there must be some way to do this. I just can't find it anywhere...
Thank you
Most often people encrypt their own buttons and use either the custom field which gets sent pack to you, or the item number field. Look into how to encrypt your own buttons with PHP.
PayPal offers a sample in their SDK which can be found here.
I stumbled upon this excellent piece that succinctly lays out how to make dynamic encrypted paypal buttons. It is just what I needed. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
http://www.stellarwebsolutions.com/en/articles/paypal_button_encryption_php.php
Related
Introduction
Hello I'm going to sell a software using serial keys. Any person can go into my webpage and click on the paypal button to buy a serial key, they don't need to register.
What I'm trying to achieve
I need to let any person use the button and receive a serial key when the payment is done.
So the workflow would be something like:
Any person (non-registered) clicks on the button.
The paypal page shows up.
The user pays and gets redirected to a page that shows something like "Congratulations, here is your serial key: {{serialKey}}" and also receives the same serialKey via email.
What I tried
I'm trying to use Paypal's Smart Checkout but I don't understand how to implement what I need.
Right now I'm able to:
Render the button.
The button performs a request to my back to get the price (so the user can't change it and trick me).
The paypal page shows up.
On success it performs a request to my back.
On failure it restarts.
What I'm missing:
How can I check that the payment did actually succeed on the back, I mean that I received the money? Is there any way that I can post to paypal using the ID and see if I that transaction was correct?
Additional question
Is this the right approach? All I need is to let anyone click the button, pay and receive a serial key ONLY if the payment was correct. Right now it seems too complex for what I need. I don't understand everything I see on the paypal docs, if you follow it line by line the examples don't work, you have to adapt a lot of the code and I'm not sure about what I'm doing.
I also read IPN's docs but using it I won't be able to redirect the user because everything would be done in the back without the user even knowing what is happening.
Final text
Any help is appreciated. I'm asking here because I saw a lot of another questions about paypal like this one that were upvoted.
The most robust approach is to combine the PayPal Checkout front-end with a v2/orders backend for payment setup and capture.
create order
capture order
This way the capture happens from your server, so you have an immediate success/failure API response -- and can immediately do whatever you need to do to handle the business logic of the digital good purchase (serial key activation/distribution)
Once you have everything working well for the happy path, don't neglect to handle funding source failures, so that if the capture fails due to e.g. the buyer's first card being declined, this is propagated back to the UI and the buyer can select a different funding source.
The paypal IPN simulator "currently" (As in I'm assuming never will) does not have functionality to test the subscr_payment payment option, this is really putting a dead hault in my project. I've read that I can just create a button that simulates this, but I don't have a clue how and after looking I can't find any information on it.
I'm creating a subscription based system for hosting a special type of website, I have everything done besides for the subscription model now and it seems like it's going to be the hardest part.
It is completely possible to test recurring billing with Paypal.
There are multiple ways possible for this.
One is the paypal subscribe button and another way (which i have used) is via a subscription form.
For the subscribe button you can refer this documentation, it contains all the information you need to setup this.
For second method, you need to create a form and place all the required variable in that form.
All the required variables are listed here.
I hope this helps.
Hopefully this workaround will help you. From within the PayPal developer site, you can go to the IPN simulator, select Transaction Type as Web Accept, click Show All Fields. You can then edit txn_type to be subscr_payment, subscr_signup, etc.
It's not perfect, as it doesn't give you all of the variables, but you can put info in other entries, and use a logical to determine whether or not the correct entry exists.
Do one test subscription, so that you have the values, and then work from there.
Imagine a site like istockphoto or envato where the user can only purchase digital credits...
How would one implement this in the cleanest, easiest way using paypal's API's? The docs there are a bit confusing to navigate...
Aside from that general "best-practices" question, my guess was to start with the Integration Wizard at https://devtools-paypal.com/integrationwizard/ and select "Express Checkout - Digital goods"
After setting up some test accounts on the sandbox, I've kinda sorta got it working- but I'm confused how I track dynamic data across the session.
I.e. where would I securely store the "number of credits" and "userid" values so that it gets added to this user (who may not have an email address, nevermind one matching their paypal account) upon successful payment. Is a database/callback system necessary?
Assuming so for the time being, my guess is to maybe store the data in a database where the primary key is the TOKEN received at SetExpressCheckoutDG(), and prepopulated fields are the data I want to keep... and then the final confirm.php page will check the database at that token and implement that data... but something just seems strange about that, i.e. relying on a callback (could be timeouts, etc.) and I'm not sure if it's really the most secure way of doing it.
If using examples, please stick with PHP (not curl or other langs). Thanks!
You could just bounce this along with your calls. I'll use NVP for my examples
You set your digital goods in SetExpressCheckout. Inside, you pass how many credits the user is buying and set the PAYMENTREQUEST_0_CUSTOM with their user ID.
In GetExpressCheckoutDetails that data would be passed back to you so you could store it in some fashion (you would get their items and quantity, plus the user ID). Then, you finish with DoExpressCheckoutPayment.
If that still doesn't help let me know.
I am integrating my system with moneybookers and I have one question. Is it possible to get a transaction_id from a cancel_url? Does anybody know if cancel_url comes with any parameters like return_url (moneybookers documentation says nothing about it)? I need this because I want to show the user for which payment the problem occurred.
Thanks in advance for your help.
I would have thought not because if the user cancels, then there's no transaction.
This falls on your side, where you'll need to create an order in your database when a user clicks checkout, and then have your Moneybookers callback update the order based on the order ID.
With PayPal, you can send custom fields with a payment request which is commonly used to send the order ID on your site; I assume there's something similar with Moneybookers.
I have successfully posted my custom shopping cart to PayPal -- it processes the order just beautifully, and when the payment is received, it posts data back to the URL I specified in the config. The code is based on the library found here: http://www.phpfour.com/blog/2009/02/php-payment-gateway-library-for-paypal-authorizenet-and-2checkout/
So I'm successfully verifying the IPN by posting data back to PayPal -- that is all great. Here's my dilemma -- how do I know what order the IPN is confirming?
I am not making use of PayPals shopping cart, I have my own. It has it's own cart ID in my database, and when I receive an IPN for that cart, I'd like to "close" the cart and save it as an order to be looked up at a later date.
I've tried passing an additional custom field along with the redirect to PayPal that populates the cart, but that value isn't returned back to me in the IPN. The documentation on x.com is just plain lacking so I've found no help there.
Does anyone have any experience with PayPal and IPN? Doesn't necessarily have to be with PHP -- I can interpret code -- but if you have a way to send a value to PayPal with an order and then have that value returned with the IPN, that is AWESOME!
If this isn't possible with PayPal's API (which I would find hard to believe) -- any other suggestions on how to handle this?
I do not know if this is a good idea or not, but here are a couple different options:
A: Use the first set of on1 / os1 for the item 1 and add the order id to that.
B: In the custom field, I am not sure what you have in there, but you can make it something like orderidhere41|otheritems here and then just parse this out by exploding at the | to get them separated.
Paypal does limit this, and I do not know why, but both of those should work. Doing it as an on / os will put it on the paypal receipt for the user, so that is my preferred method.
If someone else has a better solution, I would be interested in it as well!
EDIT:
Clarifying on1 os1. These are "options" generally used for Size / color etc. See IPN PDT Paypal variables under option_name1 option_selection(sp) for more information on them. The name of course is the title which would be "Order ID" the os would be the actual id.
EDIT:
Looking through that documentation $my2CO->addField('cart_order_id', rand(1, 100)); is where I would put my own cart order id. That should be the correct field. Sorry for the confusion :)
EDIT:
In the end there is a custom field for the paypal IPN, called "custom" adding data to this will pass through, this will transfer the orderid for you to and from. It must be called custom on both sides.
(this may be different for the other API's).
My experience has been with the Express checkout via C#, but the process should be the same even in PHP. If you're using the Name-Value Pair (NVP) interface right before you redirect the user to PayPal you hit the PayPal site to retrieve the redirection URL. As part of their response they pass back a token to you. You save this token along with your order. When the IPN postback occurs you get this same token back which lets you look up the original order.
The process flow looks like this ("You" being your site):
User fills cart, clicks button/link to check out
Request is sent to your site
Your site receives request, sends data to PayPal
You get an initial response from PayPal which contains a token
You save this token along with this user's shopping cart.
You redirect the user to the link returned by PayPal
User is redirected to PayPal and enters payment info
Payment info is validated by PayPal
User is redirected back to your site
PayPal sends IPN response back to your site
You grab the token included in the response
You look up the token you previously saved to find the shopping cart (they are the same value)
You close out the initial order/shopping cart.
You might want to try out the PHP SDK - scroll down to the Name-Value Pair Interface.
I very much doubt this will help the original poster, but PayPal have either added, or finally documented the option "invoice" which allows you to post the OrderID, and have it posted back via the IPN.
I am currently using this and it seems to work as expected.
For further info see the Website Payments Standard Integration Guide (PDF): Appendix A, Table A.4
You can create and post a custom pass-through variable that's 255 characters long that could hold any data. More info on page 44 in the official Paypal IPN Guide.