Best/easiest payment solution to integrate with PayPal

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bobthebuilder
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Posts: 32
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2011 5:06 pm

Best/easiest payment solution to integrate with PayPal

Post by bobthebuilder »

Hello

I have already got a nice cart working for my website, all done via PHP. On my cart page I can easily access the total cost, postage charge etc and want to process the payments via Paypal. Anyone know if there are any good tools that could take my details and interface easily to PayPal and my buisness account there? I have spent hours trawling through the Paypal documentation and am getting frustrated at the complexity. I would have thought this would be trivial!
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califdon
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Re: Best/easiest payment solution to integrate with PayPal

Post by califdon »

Yes, PayPal's documentation is both confusing and out-of-date. I recommend that you post in the PayPal Developers forums. Since PayPal has their own shopping cart software, they seem to assume that you'll use it if you need a cart. But you can also just use their payment process if you want to do that. Basically, you just do your own selections and calculations on your site and then send just the single total to PayPal, probably using their IPN transaction process, which is described (in gory detail) in their documentation. Of course, that means that PayPal and any reporting from them cannot show any details about the purchase, only the dollar total. You will have to rely on your own data (that PayPal never sees) for any reporting, follow-up on transactions, etc. That is why it is often better to use their shopping cart system and let them capture and report on details. But that depends on your particular application, of course.
bobthebuilder
Forum Commoner
Posts: 32
Joined: Tue Mar 22, 2011 5:06 pm

Re: Best/easiest payment solution to integrate with PayPal

Post by bobthebuilder »

I'm glad I'm not the only person to find their documentation difficult. They either seem geared to people who want to chuck "Buy it now" buttons everywhere (which won't obviously work with my application) or fully-fledged developers who have black-belt levels of time and knowledge to throw at the problem.

I think I have found the solution for me however: the Lionite_paypal class at

http://www.binpress.com/app/php-paypal-api-class/20

I'm still trying it out on my development environment but I think it will integrate nicely into my application. I was also given a lot of
help by the author, who I believe is this forum's very own Eran! Thanks again Eran. :bow:
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