Paypal ([ic] wells fargo epay)

JT Justman interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Thu Jan 10 21:33:01 2002


<<My question is:  If you were me, would you release it to the interchange
project to be used by all for free if you had to pay for it????>>

Yes, I would. As Rackie pointed out, you'd get better support / bugfixes
from the community at large. Also, the more options Interchange supports,
the more people will be interested in using it, the more good minds on the
list / the more new features done for pay by Redhat. It's like trickle-down
Open Source... a year from now, some company may decide to use IC because
it's the best option out there with support for wells fargo epay. Six months
later, they might pay Redhat to design support for some new technology,
which you could make use of.

<<The next question would also be: would a group of users be willing to put
in for a paypal module???

Isn't the only reason to use paypal that it's free (transaction fees aside)?
If you want to spend the money, you might as well just put out the cash for
any one of the better-supported processors and save your customers the
paypal account hoops. That is, unless the fabled "silent post" feature could
be a reality. I suspect, however, that no matter what you do your customer
will still be forced to complete part of their checkout on PayPal's server,
where you have minimmal control over the checkout process. The customer
could be unsure who they are buying from, and at the end of the transaction,
PayPal states that "Your Transaction is Completed", which may lead the
customer to close their browser window before looking at your reciept /
thank you page, where you may relay important information about when the
order will be shipped, not to mention do a little sales and encourage the
customer to come back again.

I use PayPal in my store at the moment, since our total investment in this
site is about $50 plus inventory and hosting fees, and about 500 hours of my
time spent learning enough about Interchange, Perl, and SQL to get by. We
don't expect to be very big right away, but once I get to the point where I
expect to make money from the site, I will move on to a more customizable
processor. Also, using PayPal means that the customer's credit card number
is never on my server.

I'm a designer, not a programmer, but on my site, I have implemented PayPal
fairly seamlessly without even modifying the order routes. I plan to add
support for their Instant Payment Verification (so that IC will
automatically check with PayPal to be sure the amount was paid, without
relying on the success and failure retun URLs) and make it work within the
order routes sooner or later and post it to the list. If anyone is
particularly interested in this, let me know off-list and it might intice me
to get it done sooner than later.

> Scott Carter
>

JT Justman