Blog entries about web design & development, our clients, our projects, our company, and more

Receiving Unique Payments with PayPal

Posted February 05, 2008 @ 12:31 PM, by Marc, in Business, Client — 0

For you busy folks: skip the article below and view the explanations, steps, code examples, and live demonstrations.

Boston Web Studio has been creating websites since January, 2005, yet during the first three years we were never asked if credit cards were accepted for invoice payments. During those first few years we simply received checks and had given very little thought to receiving any other form of payment. Not long ago, however, three clients asked if we could take credit cards and, unfortunately, I had to answer “no,” but I promised that we would soon.

I figured PayPal would provide a perfect solution, but after poking around their website a bit, I learned that it was almost perfect. I discovered that my particular needs weren’t met without making some changes to the code generated by their Buy Now button wizard.

I was aware that there is an API that could handle this without having to manually edit the HTML generated by the button wizard, but I wanted to continue with this method because I felt that it was easier, and faster, to implement. Working with the HTML, as I demonstrate, is simple, and if your needs aren’t elaborate, it’s a great solution.

Our invoicing process is rather typical: QuickBooks is used to handle all of the accounts and our clients are sent invoices at the end of each month as a PDF attachment in an email. Setting up this process requires very little; a copy of QuickBooks, an email address, and mailing address. Receiving credit card payments, though, required a few more resources. We needed a process that allowed a client to:

• Specify the amount they are paying
• Specify the invoice number
• Enter their credit card information in a secure environment
• Have their credit card information checked/authorized
• Have money withdrawn from their credit card account and deposited in our PayPal account

The PayPal Buy Now button wizard, by default, didn’t meet the first two needs; it requires a specific amount of money and item number be associated with each button it makes for you. We, on the other hand, need our clients to define those values on a case-by-case basis.

Rather lazily, I sent an email to PayPal’s support team asking if they had a different wizard on their site, one that allowed for a few text input fields where users could enter unique information, such as price and invoice number, because each transaction would be unique. The response I received was, in more words than this, “Sorry, we don’t.”

With that I was left to manipulate the code that is generated by the Buy Now button wizard and make it work as needed. I changed the type attribute’s value on a couple of input elements, moved them around a bit, deleted some unnecessary elements, and added my own submit button to replace the PayPal branded one that’s there by default.

Bonus: Along with the button wizard’s form-based code came another helpful treat: an anchor element whose href value has predefined values for amount, item number—or invoice number, in my case—and more. I made a few small changes to this href value and now I use it in the emails I send to our clients. As a result, our clients receive an email with an invoice attached, as they always have, and now there is also a clickable link that allows them to pay that particular invoice with their credit/debit card, online, with the amount and invoice number predefined. It only requires me to make small adjustments to the href value for each email I send.

To better explain all of this, I created a supplement for this article with brief explanations, steps, code examples, and live demonstrations of both the form and the anchor element I mentioned above. I hope that it helps you easily accept credit cards from your own clients, and if anybody has tips or ideas for improvement, I would appreciate hearing from you.

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