The situation is as follows: there's a website that connects sellers and buyers, like Ebay.
Among other things the owner of the website needs to know the details of each transaction initialized from there. Essentially I am looking for a payment method that returns a digital receipt.
Is it possible to do something like that with PayPal?
Of course you can do it like this.
Couple of things that you will have to do:
Have sellers register their PayPal information with. Lets say in "sellers" table, with merchant email/ merchant id as primary key.
Sellers will have to setup IPN URL on their PayPal accounts. There url will have to point to the IPN handler that you will create
Handle the IPN, check this out http://boolcast.com/joomla/3-development/13-joomla-custom-paypal-ipn. I wrote that PayPal IPN handler for Joomla a while back, you can eaily modify it and use it for what you need (you will have to remove merchant info from config). Also here is a list of IPN vars that you will receive https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_admin_IPNReference
If IPN is good, While handling the IPN check the receiver_email and/or receiver_id to determine who is the seller. You can retrieve the seller information from "sellers" table by the email/merchange_id. At this point you can generate all kinds of notifications to seller/buyer/yourself/etc...
Things to note:
You will not be able to use merchant ID if non primary PayPal user will be creating PayPal button.
List of IPN variables will depend on the type of payment and how it is submitted
ALWAYS use PayPal Sandbox
This has nothing to do with PayPal. Your notification of this "market website" needs to be done in your own code.
So yes, it is possible.
Related
On my website, I want to set up a "pay to remove ads" feature, and I want to collect payments for it through PayPal. The setup that I want for this is quite simple:
User pays
Payment is verified
The entry in the MySQL database containing the user's information is updated to disable ads on the site for that user
To do this, I want to use PayPal's IPN service. I understand the basics of it, but I am not quite sure how to implement it, nor do I understand how I can trigger the script to update the database for the correct user. I would imagine that to do this, I need to include some means of user identification whenever they begin the payment process, but I am not sure how to do that either. I am trying to implement this in PHP.
The process would be:
The user has an ID
When he pays, you attach this ID as the custom parameter in the PayPal request
You also define what url you want to call for the IPN
Once the payment is complete, PayPal sends the IPN
You verify that the actual status of the payment is "Completed"
You retrieve the user'ID from the custom parameter
You update your table
I hope it's clear :)
Am having a lot of trouble getting my head around this paypal payment stuff...
How can i confirm that the user has successfully signed up for my subscription?
I know 0 about IPN but for example : If a user signs up to my website with example#e.com but uses the paypal account sample#s.com to pay then how to i match up the user.
I read that PDT do not send out a transaction ID (tx) for recurring (subscription) payments is that true ?
Just need help with it all... honest and easy :)
Thanks.
Yeah sometimes is hard to understand Paypal and all their documentation but for any kind of subscription i would recommend Paypal IPN. You set IPN URL in your paypal account for example: http://www.domain.com/ipn.php. Then you create a subscription button in paypal account where you can set the price, recurring price etc.
More about Paypal IPN you can read here:
https://www.paypal.com/ipn
When creating Paypal button you can also add some custom fields which can help you determine which customer really pays. So for example you have a database of users and there is user with userid=100, username=Nickname and registered_email=xxx#gmail.com. Now you can decide to add userid=100 as a custom field and add this to paypal button. For example CUSTOM=100.
ipn.php in this case is a script which handles all the logic. When user pay, Paypal send any status to http://www.domain.com/ipn.php (you set this in your paypal account as IPN URL). So ipn.php in this case needs to check if payment is complete and status is ok. Then retrieve a CUSTOM field ($_POST['custom']) which is in this case 100 (userid). And then update your database with users and somehow mark that this user payed of course if status is Completed.
Hope this helps a little. But in this case it's not really important from which paypal account user pays and which is registered in your database. All you need is that you somehow link it together. In this case with userid or something like that.
If you want to implement Paypal IPN and your customers don't use same email from my experience you can use a form to authenticate the user
user login on your website with xxx#example.org
user clicks on your item and pays with yyy#example.org
after he pays you can redirect him to a form where they can merge Paypal account with website account
every time that user pays then your IPN will be covered by the information he provided
you should save his payment information for later use.
I'm doing a project involving Paypal, more specifically with the NVP API in PHP. But I just can't seem to figure what to use the IPN feature for.
I mean, when the user has been redirected to Paypal to confirm the purchase, he is redirected back to my website's "Paypal-succes-page", when the transaction is complete. And just to be sure that he actually payed i could use the "PaymentDetails" operation.
Now where does IPN fit in this process? and what is the benefit of it?
Thanks
The integrate with PayPal's services you will notice there are three main channels (and IMO it's important to know this so you can decide the benefits for your application):
IPN: Instant Payment Notification
PDT: Payment Data Transfer
PayPal's API
To use PayPal's IPN you need to add a 'listener' script (example) and add the address to your PayPal account. Whenever an event occurs PayPal will send a message directly to your server via your listener and you then update your accounts appropriately. This is especially useful for running subscription services as events will occur in the background without user intervention and you can capture successful/failed recurring payments etc.
PayPal's PDT is a system for accepting data when a user is redirected back to your site from PayPal. For example, a user clicks 'Buy', they are directed to PayPal, enter information etc. Then, once the payment has been taken, they are redirected back to your site. PayPal can pass details about the transaction including whether it was successful or not so you can display the appropriate success/failed page from your site.
PayPal's API allows you to integrate more deeply with PayPal's services, and you would use this if you were managing payments directly from your site.
These services aren't mutually exclusive, so you can use any combination with your application.
I hope this helps
The IPN feature is a very useful feature which you should use to update your database in my opinion. Sure the user is redirected to your success-page after the purchase where you can validate the payment details.
But what if he closes (by accident or not) the browser before reaching your success page? You will never know the result of the transaction and you will never update your database or process his order accordingly.
When using the IPN you can be sure that the transaction result will always reach you because PayPal will keep on making an offline request to your IPN page until it has reached your servers.
Instant Payment Notification
The typical usage of the IPN is to validate the purchase and to let your script or management system know that the transaction is complete so your system can update any records you may have for your service.
But the most important part is that the transaction is validated.
IPN send all data about transaction to your server - price, items, contacts ... so you can check, if someone don't pay you only 1$ instead of 100$ and confirm your order. It prevets thiefs, cheaters, ... USE IT! ;)
I'm just starting out with Paypal, so this is a newbie question.
I've been going through the instructions for setting up Paypal subscription service, but I think I'm looking at the wrong thing.
What I want to acheive is to get back some kind of response from Paypal so that I can update the database on my web site to mark a registered user as having paid. Basically I have a flag in the database that says if the user is subscribed or not. I want to ensure that the user is marked as paid so long as their Paypal subscription is maintained.
While the instructions linked above do say how to set up a button to receive a payment, there's nothing there about getting any data back from Paypal.
I know there are terms like IPN and sandbox that are related to what I'm trying to do, but I can't find clear instructions for how to get started on this process. I'm just circling around and not getting anywhere.
Where do I start on setting this up? Where is there a clear beginner's tutorial?
Also, I'm using PHP/Javascript/MySQL on my website.
PayPal's IPN service is what you want to use. I've used it myself to do just what you're looking to do.
Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is PayPal's message service that
sends a notification when a transaction is affected. Once IPN is
integrated, sellers can automate their back office so they don’t have
to wait for payments to come in to trigger order fulfillment. IPN can
send notifications for these transactions:
Instant payments, including Express Checkout and direct credit card payments
eCheck payments and pending, completed, or denied status payments
Pending payments
Recurring payments and subscriptions
Authorizations
Disputes, chargebacks, reversals, and refunds
You can also view notifications on PayPal’s IPN History page and
resend them if you need to. As PayPal’s interface for handling
purchase confirmation and server-to-server communications, IPN can
also be used to manage and customize a variety of APIs and
communications, including:
Customize your website's response to customer purchases in seconds
Track customers via IPN "pass-through" variables
Notify sellers who deal mostly in software downloads and other digital, online goods
Track affiliate sales and commissions
Store transaction information in your own database
For more about IPN:
Technical Overview (link to new html version of docs on developer central)
Instant Payment Notification Guide (PDF)
Code Samples
I'm not sure if its the same thing, but I just setup my friends website with Express Checkout, and I wanted to add all paid orders to an orders table in my database.
After I call SetExpressCheckout, and the user is returned to my site after going through the purchase flow on Paypal's side,
I used the information from GetExpressCheckoutDetails.
Then, if DoExpressCheckoutPayment
is successful (also called from the "callback" page) I then do the appropriate work in my database as far as logging the order details. For you in this case, it could be updating a record for the user in the database.
Hope that helps a little.
I'm looking to implement a very simple Paypal integration whereby I can enter a valid Paypal Email address (recipient) and a dollar amount, and click "Pay." Ideally, it would send the money from my paypal account automatically via my API key.
I currently have Mass Pay set up with PHP, and it's working fine, except that it charges me 2% on every payment, and doesn't pass back the Transaction ID. It also kinda seems unnecessary since I don't need to pay multiple people at once.
Since I only need to do one transaction at a time, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a simpler Paypal API for single outgoing transactions from my account.
I've been reading the documentation all day and I've yet to find what I'm looking for.
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
PayPal has sample codes for integrating various PayPal features on it's website. This includes PHP take a look at the list of features and I'm sure what you are looking for is there.
Also from the paypal site:
PayPal receives the MassPay request and returns a response indicating
success or failure. If PayPal returns a successful response, then
PayPal processes the payments and, if you have Instant Payment
Notifications (IPN) enabled, PayPal sends a notification to the Notify
URL specified in your account profile. If you do not have IPN enabled,
you can view the details of the MassPay transaction in your PayPal
account.
This implies that in the case of mass pay you need to provide a URL where paypal sends payment notifications. Your program can probably check this url to figure out whether a payment has been made or not, I would suspect this would be the case for all payment integration. That being said I would print_r the the response from paypal, I'm sure something like a transaction id will probably be in there. In the case of DoAuthorization it does return the transaction id
In the case of mass pay it does return the transaction id if IPN is enabled