Does anyone know how to get PayPal buttons to work properly on a website?

This is giving me fits, and PayPal support is less than useless. I realize this is a broad question, but are there any obvious dos or don'ts that I should know about?

Or, is there a better option than PayPal that I should know about?

---

The laid-back NYer

http://www.NiceFishy.com

[ Edited by: Raffertiki on 2005-04-08 15:52 ]

Paypal is the best. Lowest rates. I have done it for Hukilau, etc. Email me with a specific question(s).

My god. Paypal's tech support is really useless. Aaaarrrggghhhh!

What's the question? I set up PayPal buttons on the "E" Ticket website - but dealing with International shipping & handling was a pain in the ass!

All I want is for the buttons to work. After a long wait I get an error message that reads; "Security failure. Data decryption error." PayPal keeps insisting that there is nothing wrong with their code.

Ummm - what's your work-flow?

Here's an example (albiet probably chunky & full of code I don't need - so be nice Hanford!) for a 4-Issue subscription on the "E" Ticket site, that is $24.00, with $5.00 shipping & handling - no tax.

The page can be accessed here: http://www.the-e-ticket.com/ISSUES.html

Notice that it's a "floating box" & I've replaced the PayPal gif with my own custom shopping cart logo:

and here's my checkout button code for the same:

When I did these - and plugged in the values for PayPal to generate the code (which I have changed a little bit) - I had a lot of problems with submitting the info to PayPal & PayPal never responding - or just hanging....

So - it may take you a few times to get your code generated... How many items are you doing & how complicated is it?

You say that after a long wait you get an error message that reads; "Security failure. Data decryption error." Is that when you are generating the code - or actualy trying to use it on your site?

I just tested your buttons on this page:
http://www.nicefishy.com/NF_Prints.html

and they seem to work fine!

I just tested your buttons on this page:
http://www.nicefishy.com/NF_Prints.html

and they seem to work fine!

That's odd. Did you try to "order" a second item. That's where the problem occurs and I get the error message.

At one point, when things were working, they gave me an extra line of code that was supposed to charge one flat shipping rate regardless off how many items were ordered. Come to think of it, this is where my troubles started.

You want code, you asked for it. This is it along with their explaination. Followed by a chunk of code from my site:

You can add additional options anywhere between the:

and the
tag.

input type="hidden" name="handling_cart" value="x.xx"

Where "x.xx" is the handling charge that will be
applied to the transaction
regardless of how many items are purchased. This
line of code would have to
be in the source code of each button so if any item
is added to the cart,
the handling charge will apply. If multiple items
are added to the cart,
the 1st non-blank "handling_cart" value will be
used.

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Thanks Tang.

I have checked it on my two computers and everything worked fine. I think it's an issue with your browser security settings or something. I created a bunch of orders on the cart and went to check out and all.

I actually find their support pretty good. Software too. You can get a return cookie variable to track payments and if people log in, like on Hukilau, you can see what they paid for and credit their account and do it all on your site.

Anyway. Try on another computer.

Ditto for me Raffer - all your buttons seemed to work fine...
Swanky is probably right - maybe you should try it out on some other browsers? Whenever I test, I try it out on 2 or 3 different browsers to see if it's working....

As an addition to this topic, does anyone know of away to control stock when selling through paypal?
As in if you only have one of a certain item and it sells when you are asleep at night ,lets say. Some one else can't come along and try to buy the same item before you've had the chance to take it off.
Anybody?

Hmm - that is a good one.. I dunno! Swanky?

On 2005-04-12 11:22, cheekytiki wrote:
As an addition to this topic, does anyone know of away to control stock when selling through paypal?
As in if you only have one of a certain item and it sells when you are asleep at night ,lets say. Some one else can't come along and try to buy the same item before you've had the chance to take it off.
Anybody?

PayPal isn't going to manage your inventory, you have to do that on your end. That means special software. That's something I am doing with Hukilau this year. Let me break it down geek style, yo.

PayPal allows you to set the return page for after a transaction. It will pass a variable through the header info back to that page that has the complete transaction in it. So, you write code to take that variable and see what they bought and adjust your inventory. But this requires you to have an inventory and all that jazz.

For Hukilau, I am going to make it so that when you check out through PayPal, it then credits you with ticket payments and mug payments and such and I get immediate updates on all that and I can connect a PayPal payemnt by Joe Tiki's PayPal account, made by his wahine who logged into Hukilau as Jane Wahine. No more trying to figure that mess out. And the biggy, no more missed payments because PayPal didn't email me. THAT happens about once in ten payments. Grrr!