Introduction

The PayPal connector allows you to easily collect payments with your web form. In order to set up a basic PayPal connector, you must provide the system with your PayPal account information, define how form responses translate into PayPal purchases, and provide messages to keep your users informed about the process. In the steps described below, we’ll show you how to complete these steps using the tutorial form ‘Conditional Questions’.

Note that there are no definite restrictions on what the form may contain or what you may sell with it, but this service is better suited for simple situations, where:

• You have a limited number of types of items to sell.
• Items have a fixed price and a fixed or variable quantity.
• Shipping & handling fees and taxes are applied to the total price.

Here are a few examples:

• Selling intangible goods such as music (mp3), software, e-books, …
• Charging a membership or an admission fee.
• Charging a flat fee for consulting services.
• Accepting donations.
• Selling physical goods, to the extent that inventory is not an issue.

Creating an Example Membership Payment Page with PayPal:

Open a copy of the form ‘Conditional Questions’. If you do not already have a copy, you can create one here. Familiarize yourself with the form. There are three membership levels, each with a different cost:

Each level can be paid for 1 – 6 months:

We want to now bill users for their selection.

Close the form. From the form configuration page that displays, select ‘Connectors’.

Select ‘Configure’ under the ‘PayPal’ heading.

Inside the PayPal Connector, click ‘enable’ to enable the paypal connector, then fill out the information in ‘Step 1 of 5 – PayPal Account Information’. (Note that if you don’t know which kind of PayPal account you have, you have a personal account.)

In ‘Step 2 of 5 – Item(s) for Sale’ click ‘add your first item for sale’.

The form has three items, ‘Platinum Level’, ‘Gold Level’, and ‘Silver Level’. In the ‘Product Name’ box that appeared when you clicked ‘add your first item’, put ‘Platinum Level’. In the ‘Product Code’, place ‘MEM-PT-001′ (the ‘Product Code’ is a unique reference number you can optionally provide for your own records).

In the ‘Unit price:’ row, select ‘Defined in the form:’ and select the field containing the membership levels, ‘What membership level would you like?’. A table will appear, containing the membership options on the left, and empty boxes to receive the membership prices on the right. In this case, we only want to fill in the cost for a ‘Platinum’ level membership, place ‘40.00′ (note that lack of a currency (’$') symbol, as we specified dollars already) then click the red ‘disable’ buttons next to the ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ options.

In the ‘Unit quantity:’ row, select ‘Defined in the form:’ and select the field ‘How many months of membership would you like?’. Again a table will appear with the choices on the left, and on the right, blanks for you to enter choice values. In this case, enter ‘1′ for ‘1 Month’, ‘2′ for ‘2 Months’, and so on, until the item section looks like this:

Now we need to repeat this process for the ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ options. They should end up looking like:

Now the connector is almost complete. We’ve created three items (Platinum, Gold, and Silver Memberships) and sold the user a given number of months of that membership (1,2,3 … 6). For the moment, skip steps 3 and 4 (you can find more information on them here).

Finally in step 5 – ‘Pay Now Page’, provide your customers with a ‘please click here to pay by paypal’ message to be displayed when they order.

Click ‘Save’. The message ‘Your connector has been saved’ should appear after a short wait.

Go to your form, and test out your order process. After clicking ’submit’ you should be taken a page with your ‘Pay Now Page’ message and a PayPal button. Clicking on this button will take you to the PayPal website to complete the order.

If your ‘Pay Now Page’ does not display when you submit your order, please visit PayPal Troubleshooting, which has a list of some of the common causes.

Within PayPal’s payment process, your customers can choose to pay by credit card or PayPal account.  If they choose to pay by PayPal they will be automatically returned to your form’s thank-you page on completion.  If they choose to pay by credit card, they will be taken to a receipt page after payment which will direct them to click to return to your thank-you page.

Configuring Shipping Addresses and Order Encryption

Shipping Address

In most cases when shipping is required, you should allow PayPal to collect the shipping information from your users using the option ‘I need PayPal to collect it for me’, as the PayPal system has very stringent checks on the validity of shipping addresses. However, if you would prefer to collect the shipping information on your form, you can do so using the option ‘My form is designed to collect it’. Exporting the shipping address works like the item quantity setting. For each address field, select in the drop-down list the corresponding question in your web form.

Order Encryption

By default, the data transmitted to PayPal is not encrypted. This could allow a malicious customer to modify an item price or description before paying for it. This should not be a problem as long as you are checking every order before delivering the goods.

If you have a Premier or Business account, we can use a secure certificate to encrypt the data. This prevents the risk mentioned above and opens the possibility of automating the delivery process since no manual review of the order is necessary. To create your secure certificate, follow the instructions in step 4 of your connector.

Please note that the actual payment occurs on PayPal’s website and is always securely encrypted. This particular setting only affects how we transmit the content of the shopping cart to PayPal.