Paypal payment attached to a form submission

Can anyone suggest a way of doing this?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Bear with me me. I am not very good at this ecommerce stuff ;)

I have a client who provides specialised training for people. She offers one day training courses and takes bookings for these through an online form which asks applicants to provide some required information before booking a course. When they book the course they can pay online via Paypal but there are three or four options for payment.

When clients submit the online application they are taken to the payment area and asked to pay the appropriate amount using Paypal. The payment amount is left open since it could be one of three options. The applicant is just asked to pay the appropriate amount. Clearly this is no good and applicants often pay the wrong amount. Is there an easy way that Paypal can be attached to a form and the payment amount adjusted dependent on what the client has selected?

I appreciate that this would probably be quite easy for a Paypal developer but I don't do coding myself. Does Paypal or any of the other systems offer anything that can handle this? Can anyone suggest a better way of doing it?

[aleksl]

As far as I know you can have payment options on he form page - a dropdown or combo boxes with prices - and then pass amount to PayPal. Thus, on PayPal side amount will be already prepopulated. I believe you can even make it such that customers can't change it.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Does anyone know if there are any ready made tools that would facilitate this type of transaction?

[Patrick Taylor]

What about Mal's e-commerce? Works well, and easy to set up.

[farmboy]

A simple method, using PayPal payment buttons, would be to have the customer complete the registration form. After the form is submitted, the customer lands on a page with the various payment options.

"If you want to get the full course, pay $50 now.

If you want to get the half course, pay $25 now."

Beside each line would be a PayPal payment button for the appropriate amount. I would get the registration form completed before payment because some people don't click on the "Continue" link PayPal provides and would never make it back to the site to complete a form.

FarmBoy

[farmboy]

You might also want to consider eventbrite.

FarmBoy

[vincevincevince]

I'd do it in two pages. Let them choose the method on the first page, then press Submit and be taken to the new page, on which you use PHP / ASP / Perl etc. to calculate and complete the correct total amount.

[jecasc]

I think the link to Paypal goes like this

https: //www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr

All you have to do is add the correct query strings:

cmd=_xclick
business=[e-mail]
item_name=itemname
amount=00.00

So in the end it looks like this:

https: //www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&item_name=itemname...

and so on

There is a documentation off all possible variables somewhere on the Paypal homepage.

Anyone with some basic knowledge of a scripting language like PHP or ASP should be able to get the information from the form and redirect to Paypal. It's also possible to transfer the information in POST variables.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I guess I'm going to have to learn how to code but trying to find the time is my big problem :(