PayPal Programming
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What is the PayPal API?
PayPal has traditionally provided Internet merchants credit card processing by referral of the customer to the PayPal site for payment. In March of 2000, Confinity and X.com merged to create PayPal. In October of 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay. PayPal cleared approximately $11 billion in just the fourth quarter of 2006, managing 133 million accounts in 103 country markets.
PayPal WebServices API - PayPal WebServices API refers to the application processing interface provided by PayPal for the utilization of PayPal’s Internet-based system of payments and money transfers for the support of e-commerce. PayPal readily makes its family of API’s available to developers and operates a sandbox test environment for applications using it. The Integration Center, accessible from the main PayPal web site contains detailed instructions for using the PayPal SDKs for Website Payments Pro, Express Checkout, and several other functionalities. Examples of applications created by developers are Transaction searches, payment en masse, and refund processing. The API is based on the open standard “Web Services.” This comprehends SOAP, WSDL and XML.
Payflow Pro- A hosted payments gateway usable by merchants in e-commerce to process on-line credit card transactions. Paypal acquired Payflow from Verisign. The host provides users with an SDK for creating applications that integrate the gateway into their webpages. Access may be accomplished either by a Payflow Pro API (available through Paypal) or by “Payflow Link,” a cut-and-paste solution to inserting the gateway into a web page. The Payflow Pro mechanism is operationally simple. After connection is established, the client sends packets in NVP (name-value-pair) format. The host then acknowledges with a response code to indicate success, failure or other, plus transaction details. Payflow Pro is a separate interface from the Paypal API.
Website Payments Pro - In 2005 PayPal launched Website Payments Pro, which permits credit card processing via PayPal, but without leaving the merchant’s site. This functionality is created by an API called Direct Payment. There is an abbreviated payment feature for customers choosing “express checkout” with a PayPal account, and an on-line web interface for merchants receiving credit card information other than via the Internet. Website Payments Pro has comparable costs to other credit card processing accounts, and benefits from integrating the card processing with the payment gateway. It is compatible with a broad range of different shopping cart formats.
