Llamawerx has completed several projects integrating PayPal with existing web sites and custom web applications. In some cases, we have integrated products and the PayPal shopping cart into an e-commerce site. On others, we’ve relied on PayPal’s notification API.
Buy Now Buttons
In some instances, our clients want to sell a single product on through their website – for example, a book. The simplest way to do that was to create a PayPal button in their account and use the PayPal generated HTML on the site. Simple, straightforward, effective. The PayPal account holder receives an email when payment is made and ships the product.
Shopping Cart
Another scenario exists when clients want to sell multiple products from the site. One could generate multiple buttons as we did in the simple case and paste them into the site. As you add products, this becomes tedious to manage and the look-and-feel of the buttons won’t match your site. Our solution is to decompose the HTML variables and program custom pages with HTML and PHP. The clicks invoke the PayPal shopping cart, payment is made and the client receives email notification.
Payment Notification
Other clients needed to use PayPal for registration information. This posed a different problem because we needed real-time confirmation that the user paid before offering them access. PayPal offers payment notification through Instant Payment Notification or IPN. By using the IPN API and managing the responses from PayPal, we capture the responses and update the database in real-time thus ensuing timely registration for the events.
PayPal offers a simple platform for sellers looking to move to the Internet. For unique applications, the programming hooks allow integrators to expand the basic offering into a custom solution.