Integrating Paypal

Peck3277

Hey all I have a few questions about integrating paypal on a site so if anyone can help that would be great!

I have been working on a personal project to sell some products. So far I have written the display catalogue and a shopping card made. My final hurdle is making the items payable with pay pl checkout. From reading this article it seems relatively simple (I am probably wrong though) https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/pdn/howto_checkout-outside

My questions are:

1. If I use this method, after I finish paying am I redirected back to my website?

2. I want to track stock on the site. If I use pay with paypal, can I have paypal automatically confirm to my website that payment has been made so I can the reduce my stock.

3. Can I get paypal to then email the customer an invoice and also email me his shipping details, his order and payment confirmation?

4. I want to use my own shopping cart as it's just so I can see if I can do it. But if there's a better way of paying can you suggest ways/articles to me. Bear in mind I want to use paypal because it's free. If the site was ever to get bigger I would look into a pro account/sage/realex.

Thanks!

techguy

Peck3277 wrote: »

1. If I use this method, after I finish paying am I redirected back to my website?

Yes, the customer will enter all their details to your page i.e. Name, Address, products required etc. Then once they confirm purchase and want to make payment they click "pay now". This will bring up a secure paypal page so they can make payment via paypal. Paypal will then send coinfirmation back to your page so you can proceed with the order.

Peck3277 wrote: »

2. I want to track stock on the site. If I use pay with paypal, can I have paypal automatically confirm to my website that payment has been made so I can the reduce my stock.

Once paypal has cofirmed payment it is up to you to use this information to reduce the stock level from your DB.

Peck3277 wrote: »

3. Can I get paypal to then email the customer an invoice and also email me his shipping details, his order and payment confirmation?

See question 1.

Peck3277 wrote: »

4. I want to use my own shopping cart as it's just so I can see if I can do it. But if there's a better way of paying can you suggest ways/articles to me. Bear in mind I want to use paypal because it's free. If the site was ever to get bigger I would look into a pro account/sage/realex.

I didn't know that paypal service was free. Are you sure they don't take a percentage of each transaction or something like that?
The paypal system is probably the easiest to get up and running. You don't need to worry about security or anything either as all the sensitive data is input to the paypal site, not yours.

acermaple

As far as I know it's free for the purchaser but not for the seller, that's how they make their money. There is a percentage charge deducted from you.

Peck3277

techguy wrote: »

I didn't know that paypal service was free. Are you sure they don't take a percentage of each transaction or something like that?
The paypal system is probably the easiest to get up and running. You don't need to worry about security or anything either as all the sensitive data is input to the paypal site, not yours.

Sorry I didn't clarify what I meant by free. (I may have some of this info wrong as it's how i understand it) Paypal take "1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 USD" for low transaction costs.

What I meant by for free was if you want to have paypal payment integrated into your site i.e payment page is done on your site not paypal's, you have to pay a €30p/m. Seeing as this is only for a small project it would be a waste of money. Plus I'd prefer paypal to look after the money side of things.

How does paypal send the confirmation to your website?

techguy

I'm a little hazey about the whole idea of communication between paypals site and the ecommerce site but I think paypal have and API for you to work with. You would then code a page on your site using PHP (or other) and the PayPal API to check for the response from paypal.

Basically you will end up writing a module in PHP for your ecommerce package. Maybe you could take a look at one of the open source packages and see how they wrote the PayPal modules.

Peck3277

Currently I'm pouring over the documentation that Pay Pal have supplied about their various API's and packages. I have also signed up to their developer sandbox account so I can play around with how the system works.

I'll keep ppl updated here with how things go if anyone is interested as I think it will be quite a useful thing to know.

But if anyone has any help/insights they can provide then please le me know! Or if anyone has done such a thing then please post here!

Thanks!

MOH

You could try looking at some of the free shopping carts like zen cart and magento to get an idea of how they integrate with paypal and other providers.