Anyone used Paypal on a site?

mikek12003

I created an online shop (PHP,mssql) and a shopping basket for the visitor to add,remove,upgrade its componets, what happens shen a user wants to byy the items in his basket? Has anyone used Paypal? Can you give me some pointers? A tutorial explaining things or something? (Went to the site of paypal didn't seem to understand how things work and the 80-paged manuals wasn't very appealing )

sneakyimp

Implementing payment gateways is not easy. You should expect to read most of the documentation. I hate to tell you this, but 80 pages is not that bad.

PayPal offers an easy way to do it whereby they host the shopping cart. You might want to consider this. Otherwise, you have to tangle with something like Website Payments Pro. I had a devil of a time implementing it. Here's a sample forum posting over there:
http://paypaldeveloper.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=wppro&message.id=170

They may have improved their documentation in the interim, but I seem to recall that it was very poorly organized and quite confusing.

I had better luck with Authorize.net. They have good customer service too.

Hope this helps.

bpat1434

I personally used IPN for a bit on a few sites of my design back in the day. IPN wasn't difficult to get my head around, but I spent about 2 weeks working at it. If you want a real challenge, use the USPS web API crap 😉

Depending upon what vendor you want to use (2Checkout, WorldPay, PayPal, CCBill, GoogleCheckout, etc.) you will no doubt have to read up on how they handle items. Unless you can find a really good framework (like Zend or Cake) that has these APIs already built in (i.e. Zend_Framework_PayPal) then you're in for some long days and nights getting things secured and just right.

JasonLester

I've done a few sites that use IPN. The thing that I like the most about it is that you can (or at least where able to) join the paypal developers network and they provided you with phony user accounts and phony bushiness accounts for testing in their sandbox. Lots of docs, and the sandbox made things easy for testing. I was making simple scripts the first day, but it took me a few weeks to feel secure with it.