[freeside-users] PayPal Integration

Richard Siddall richard.siddall at elirion.net
Mon Feb 6 07:30:01 PST 2006


Administrator wrote:
> I will contribute funds for a Business::Onlinepaymant::Paypal module.
> 

I took a few minutes at the weekend to look at the PayPal modules on
CPAN and the current PayPal APIs.

I concluded that Business::OnlinePayment and PayPal have different
models, so a Business::OnlinePayment::PayPal module probably wouldn't
make sense.  It looks like Business::OnlinePayment expects an immediate
success or failure back when it submits a request for payment, while
PayPal is more like Freeside's BILL payment type: you send a request for
payment (via a PayPal API), and some days or weeks later the customer
notices and sends you the money (which you can detect electronically).

So, it looks like PayPal is better implemented as another payment type
like BILL, CARD, LECB, etc.  We'd probably have to add another Invoice
Event action for issuing the payment request.  I didn't look at the
Instant Payment Notification enough to figure out whether it's a
security nightmare (i.e. whether you can run IPN on the billing server
or whether it's better to run it on the self-service server and forward
notifications to the billing server).

Of course, you could also modify the self-service server to interface to
the PayPal shopping cart for initial and one-time payments.  You'd just
need to make sure the billing server knew what had been paid for.

Regards,

	Richard.







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