[ic] Using PayPal in Akopia Interchange

[Scott Kennedy]

I recall one gentleman here recently saying that he had some code that he
was working on that would allow one to integrate PayPal into IC.  I would
like to offer my services to help develop that.  Anyone who is in need of
a test server to develop such a thing please let me know and I will set
you up with a guest account.  I am running Interchange 4.6.4 on Red Hat
6.2.  I have strongly considered developing such a thing myself, but when
I heard that someone was working on it, I figured I better wait to see
what others might come up with in since I haven't even started yet really.

One thing that I have done is to write a little JavaScript snippet that
would take the subtotal and create a PayPal Web Accept button in the
appropriate amount automatically.  People would then go to PayPal's secure
page to place an order.  The problem I see with this is that the info
regarding what has been ordered (shopping cart contents) wouldn't appear
on the PayPal secure page or in the PayPal receipt email message.  So, I
was considering creating some kind of workaround for this which is to
email the shopping cart contents to me while sending the user over to
PayPal.  Perhaps I better briefly outine what I have in mind here.

1) User places item(s) into shopping cart.
2) User begins the checkout process by going to the checkout page.
3) PayPal Web Accept option is selected on the checkout page from the
payment method selection box.
4) User's web browser is automatically redirected to the Web Accept secure
page with appropriate information plugged in.  The total in IC is the
total that's shown here.  Right before this redirection occurrs the
shopping cart contents is mailed to me so that I know what has been
ordered.  What is an easy way to do this?  I have some ideas here but
input would be appreciated.  The user might still get an order receipt
from IC but the mailing address and all that would be absent.

Something I'm trying to avoid here is having the user enter their mailing
address and all that twice---on the checkout form and in PayPal.  Of
course, if a payment method other than PayPal was chosen, the user would
use the checkout form as customary.  If PayPal is selected as the payment
method, all billing info would be entered into the secure form on PayPal's
servers.  I believe what I have in mind here would work unless I'm missing
something here.  I'd prefer that people be automatically returned to my
store after they are through with PayPal.  I guess if that couldn't be
done, then I could just have a new browser window open, to handle PayPal,
so that the window for the store would still be around.

For my particular application what I've described above would work, I 
think.  In cases where one would need to know if payment actually went
through or not without any human intervention (say as in a subscription or
file download situation) one would also need to get some sort of status
code from PayPal indicating that proper payment was accepted.  Somewhere
on PayPal's website the procedures involved in checking the status code is
documented.  How difficult would it be to take what they've provided and
then implement that in a PayPal module for IC?  --Scott


-- 

******************************************************
Custom Web Promotions - http://custweb.com
sales@custweb.com / (580) 371-3944 / 888-287-8932
******************************************************