Paypal solutions

Pretty easy & seamless?

[lZakl]

I have been doing website design for some time, and have never come across the need for merchant or ecommerce solutions. I do now however, and my knowledge on the subject is somewhat limited. So here it is...

I am trying to create a seamless way to accept credit cards online. I am looking at opening an paypal business account. Does anyone have experience in this..? It looks like I won’t even have to touch the credit card mess, and the funds I can access through paypal at no cost anytime. I was just wondering how seamlessly this works. The 2.9% per transaction charge is looking pretty darn good considering I have been stuck wondering how to do this for a while. I am somewhat versed in both PHP and PERL, so creating web forms is not a problem.

So I am wondering:

How does it work? Do I just get an order confirmation and verification of funds, or is there something else I have to do per-transaction on my end? I don’t want a shopping cart and can create my own web forms, does paypal allow me to do this?

Any input, advisory, critical, curiosity... Greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-- Zak

[Corey Bryant]

A lot of the gateways handle that for you. LinkPoint, Authorizenet.com, verisign will allow you to capture and process the credit card on your secure website.

If you are in the United States selling mainstream products, you are looking at about 2.4%. The rates will be raised on 1 Apr actually. If you are in the United States selling mainstream products and expect more than $1,000 a month, consider a merchant account in conjunction with Paypal

-Corey

[pp_rb]

If you want to use PayPal's Website Payments to allow your customers to pay (with or without a PayPal account), you need to add an HTML form on your site that posts the information to PayPal. For notification, you should set up Instant Payment Notification (IPN).

To create a simple payment button, log in to your PayPal account, click on Merchant Tools, and click on Buy Now Buttons. This will take you to the Button Factory, which generates the HTML form you need to copy-and-paste into your page. For more details on the options you can use in buttons, refer to the Integration Guide.

[lZakl]

pp_rb,

Thanks for the information. I looked, and that IPN seems like exactly what I want. This will notify me right away when an order is placed. And I like the "return the end user back to my page" option. That's nice. I am going to give this a go... I suppose to test it, I'll have to break out my credit card and purchase something, from myself? lol

Thanks!

-- Zak

[pp_rb]

You can do some testing on the PayPal Sandbox. Look for the Developer Central link from the PayPal page (you can probably find it under the Merchant Tools tab).

[dotme]

A word of caution - IPN is currently a mess. PayPal's had problems with it on and off for some time, and it hasn't worked for a lot of merchants for the past 24 hours. There are some pretty frustrated business owners on the PayPal dev forum today. I use PayPal, and overall I've been satisfied.

But three times in the past 6 months, they have implemented code or changes that are broken, and it takes them days to fix it. That's getting hard to take - Quite frankly, it makes them look a bit unprofessional. It's a shame - I'm sure they're a nice group of people. But the impact such failures have on customer perception is incalculable.

If you implement IPN, have a backup plan - a one-click option on your admin site for you to register an order if IPN fails. Something I am working on this afternoon.