apHarmony offers PayPal integration services to bring Ecommerce functionality to web apps and online stores.  Our team will be happy to bring our extensive PayPal integration experience to your web project.  Please feel free to give us a call at 630-855-7522 for a free evaluation and quote.

With one of the most extensive and developed APIs, PayPal offers a robust development and production environment for payment processor integration.  The standardized and competitive fees also make PayPal a good option from a business perspective.  Although a variety of PayPal payment options exist, they can generally be grouped into three areas – simple web integration, streamlined integration, and full website integration.

Simple web integration consists of a hand-off to PayPal through simple web components.  PayPal buttons and codes can be used to manage simple shopping carts, and in this scenario all the payment processing will be executed on PayPal’s servers.  While this offers the most cost-effective integration, it is generally a viable solution for only the simplest of online stores.

Streamlined PayPal integration consists of maintaining a shopping cart or customer details on the web application, while handing off to PayPal for the final steps of payment processing.  This method uses PayPal for the actual credit card acceptance, while acquiring customer information on previous screens.  Once the transaction is completed, the customer is often redirected back to the source site for generation of the receipt.  A successful implementation of the streamlined PayPal integration usually also requires IPN (Instant Payment Notification) on the back-end to securely verify, from the website, that the payment was processed.  While this method still send the customer to PayPal for purchasing, it does so in a streamlined fashion.

Finally, the full PayPal website integration makes the PayPal link completely transparent.  Transactions are processed without the customer ever visiting PayPal’s site, and the credit card and other details are entered directly through the web app.  Although this method offers the most cohesive customer experience, it also comes with the most overhead.  Due to PCI payment processor security requirements, websites that store credit card information are held to a higher standard of network security than those that use a gateway-hosted payment page.  The costs and benefits will need to be weighed before development.

For a free evaluation and quote on a PayPal payment processor integration project, please feel free to give us a call at 630-855-7522.