[ic] Pay Pal

[Mike Heins]

Quoting Peter (peter at pajamian.dhs.org):
> Kevin Walsh wrote:
> >Peter [peter at pajamian.dhs.org] wrote:
> >
> >>[snip]
> >>
> >>That could work to allow the user to enter thier 
> >>paypal username and ID and then process the transaction in the 
> >>background as you suggest would be ideal.
> >>
> >
> >There's no chance that I would give my PayPal email address and password
> >to any website, other than PayPal's own.  The password is the only
> >security offered by their system, so I would be foolish to give it to
> >any third party.
> 
> That's a good point, and one I was thinking of, but failed to mention. 
> One of the whole points of paypal is that you don't have to give out 
> your CC number to untrusted websites.  Giving that same website your 
> paypal username and password is even worse because that would allow 
> anyone with that info to access more than just your CC number.
> 
> I would have to look into IPN to see how it works (and one of these days 
> I will because we want to offer paypal as an option from our site), but 
> I think there might be a way to make it as transparent as possible with 
> the customer being sent to an intermediary page, "click here once the 
> transaction is approved in paypal" type of page and then complete the 
> purchase from there.
> 

It is quite possible to make a fair feedback mechanism for PayPal. I did
about 80% of the code (not the docs and testing), got it working, and am
completely confident it can be made to work well. But I have zero
incentive to make IC work with Paypal.

	1. To all accounts, serious businesses don't use Paypal.
           Interchange is mostly used by serious businesses.

        2. No one who wants to use Paypal is willing to spend any money
           to get the feature into Interchange. This is a likely
           byproduct of the above.

        3. Paypal sends ads, and the only way to unsubscribe from their
           spam is to delete your Paypal account. I obliged.

It is just a question of someone competent having enough desire to
do the job. I am not optimistic that will happen.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike at perusion.com>

Any man who is under 30, and is not liberal, has not heart; and any man
who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has not brains.
 -- Winston Churchill