E-Commerce applications require mechanisms for payment. Although more commonly than not e-Commerce sites will use full credit card processing gateways, giving PayPal as an additional option of payment provides additional payment options for your customers, especially those that don’t want to pay by credit card over the Internet. If you run a Web shop that uses direct credit card processing and want to integrate PayPal seamlessly, you’ll find that using PayPal as a processing service is not as straight forward as using a payment gateway. In this article I describe how you can minimize the external PayPal interaction and work the PayPal payment into the order processing workflow to provide a seamless interface using ASP.NET and C#. However, the principles used here should be applicable to any Web programming environment.
Payment processing on the Web is a big market and there a myriad of services and providers that allow you to process credit cards and bank cards over Internet connections. Most of these services are using credit card processing that automates the process of credit card validation. These providers usually provider either HTML or API based interfaces to process credit cards. HTML based interfaces provide you with a URL your application can redirect to on the provider’s site, which then handles the actual payment processing. API based interfaces allow your application talk directly to the provider’s services so that the payment processing can be integrated into your own application.
If you’re running your own E-Commerce applications you generally will want to use an API so the payment processing can be directly integrated into your own application. This makes sure the user of your app sees a consistent Web interface – as far as the user is concerned they are never leaving your site, but rather your Web backend is making the remote calls against the payment processing service and simply returning the success or failure of the request. HTML based payment interfaces generally look unprofessional as the user is whisked off to some other site for payment processing. Using external HTML processing often also requires you to handle inventory and order management through the payment provider which can be hassle especially if your e-commerce app already handles this. Still HTML based interface are popular because they can often be driven from non-data driven site and thus mitigate all the order management to the processing provider’s servers which can be beneficial for small sites.
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