Glossary Item Box
PayPal is an alternative way to allow your customers to pay using credit cards and electronic checks without you having to incur the expenses of a merchant account. PayPal performs the transaction on their website, and adds the money to your PayPal account. For more information about PayPal, see their official site at http://www.paypal.com.
This section describes how to configure Squirrelcart with PayPal's traditional payment method, which is called "PayPal Website Payments Standard". This does not cover PayPal's new service called "PayPal Website Payments Pro", which acts more like a traditional payment gateway. Instructions on setting up PayPal Website Payments Pro can be found in the topic with the same name in the Configuration > Payment > Payment Gateways > Supported Gateways section of this documentation.
Before you can accept payments via PayPal, you will need to sign up for an account. You can do so by clicking the "sign up" link at http://www.paypal.com. When you complete the registration, you will have specified an email address to receive payments to. You will need this email address to configure Squirrelcart to work with PayPal.
Auto Return for Website Payments allows merchants to eliminate the Payment Receipt page in the Website Payments flow and automatically return buyers to their website upon payment completion.
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PayPal now allows customers to pay using a credit card without having to have a PayPal account. As of this writing (10/31/2006) the Auto Return feature only works when the customer pays using their credit card. For this reason, you should also enable IPN which will be able to complete the order in Squirrelcart when a customer pays without a PayPal account. If your server does not meet the requirements for IPN you should disable Auto Return. |
Payment Data Transfer provides merchants with the ability to add additional security to a transaction by having your web server send a behind-the-scenes query to PayPal to ensure that the data received from an "Auto Return" did indeed come from PayPal. PDT requires CURL and OpenSSL.
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PDT works in conjunction with Auto Return to transmit payment details back to your website. You must enable Auto Return to use Payment Data Transfer. |
PayPal's Instant Payment Notification allows you to integrate PayPal payments with Squirrelcart's order management feature. IPN provides immediate notification and confirmation of PayPal payments you receive, and allows Squirrelcart to update the payment status on orders in your database. If you activate IPN, you will receive an IPN when a payment is first received, which will display the status of the payment (Completed or Pending). If the payment status was Pending, you will receive another IPN when the payment clears, fails, or is denied. IPN requires CURL and OpenSSL.
The payment process flow will vary depending on which (if any) of the supported features you enable. The illustration below demonstrates the payment process flow based on your configuration.
Auto Return, PDT, and IPN are optional. First, we will explain how to setup Squirrelcart to accept PayPal payments without using these additional components. Then we will explain how to enable the additional features. Please read this section in its entirety before following the steps.
There are no additional requirements for Auto Return. We recommend that you enable it, as it will allow Squirrelcart to complete the order AFTER the customer has submitted payment. With Auto Return off, the order is completed before the customer is sent to PayPal.
PDT requires CURL or fsockopen support, and OpenSSL. Do not enable PDT unless CURL and OpenSSL are available.
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Your business PayPal email address must be confirmed in your PayPal control panel for PDT to work. If you do not have a confirmed email address, you will receive the following error message: Error: No data received from PayPal. Merchant PayPal Business account email address may need to be confirmed in PayPal control panel. |
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When using PDT, your Payment Email Address in Squirrelcart must match your primary payment address in PayPal. If it does not, PDT will fail. |
IPN requires CURL and OpenSSL. Do not enable PDT unless CURL and OpenSSL are available.
http://www.EXAMPLE.COM/squirrelcart/paypal_ipn.php
Change the domain name to match your site. If you have installed Squirrelcart in a subdirectory, be sure to add that to the URL. For example, if your storefront page is http://www.example.com/store/store.php, then your IPN URL would be http://www.example.com/store/squirrelcart/paypal_ipn.php.To ensure that IPN is working, we've added a testing feature. It is designed to send an email to your PayPal email address whenever your website receives an IPN from PayPal. The email will contain all the data that was sent to your site. To enable this test feature, follow these instructions.
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