PayPal Integration

My company currently uses Chase merchant services to process our crdit card payments and we are looking at adding PayPal as a Payment method (not to replace chase but to compliment).

I am not the technical guru but my development cre is claiming that it wil take them 3 month to integrate PayPal into our sites. This sounds a little extreme... does anyone have any experience with this?

I know there is a lot of stuff to take into consideration, reporting changes, fraud procedure modifications, and new reconciliation techniques. My sites are not small and do considerable business and we have some extensive procedures but I think PayPal is worth the development time.

The Pay Pal API is actually well documented and very easy, well easy for my team to integrate. There are alot of variables to consider: actual development code, code structure, what other sources you are working with. I would really have to see your site and look at the code to see what is going on, and find out more about what you are actually trying to accomplish.

My company just finished a large custom development for the site Inspector Finder in which we used the Pay Pal merchant for all credit card transactions.

If you would like, feel free to contact me via our website and ref. this conversation. I'd be happy to have one of my developers assist you.

Yep, PayPal is pretty smooth. Not sure what you have on the reporting side, but as for transactions I would think days not months.

Thanks for the offer Tmprod and if my guys can't get anywhere I may take you up on your offer but in general we are very reluctant to bring in outside help for most projects.

PayPal is the next big payment method and I don't want to be left out in the cold. I know this will be a big business booster in the long run. I just have to get the development resources to get on board and not tell me three months.

it can be easily added into the cart you are using to send to paypal. Not stated as to your type business you may not even have a cart although I would find most of the time not the case. If you use a cart developed by your IT department it may take that long to get developed if your IT department is anything like mine. On my personal site I use cart32, paypal is built into it. Processing information is a very complex issue and especially if it is in house. I wanted to add I use carservice international to do our online processing and by adding paypal it has helped as allot of people don't have credit cards. I say do it even if it takes a month or so, i would assume your not new do it right the first time well worth the effort. A word to the wise be sure and visit ebay and see if you sell anything they consider banned as they will cancel your account if you do.

Paypal is definitely worth your time. I don't like their terms for merchants, but some customers really want to pay using PayPal and I always recommend that people take the money in any way the customer wants to give it.

If you currently have a commercially available shopping cart system, then check the features out - most systems have an interface with the PayPal API worked out.

If you are working with a custom built e-commerce solution that includes features like inventory management, order management and tracking, reporting, and such their could be some additional overhead depending on how the application is built. If it's modular then it shouldn't be that difficult to add a new form of payment. If it's not it could definitely be involve some work.

Three months sound like a long time though. Give us more details on your shopping cart system and current site setup for product display and checkout.

We use an in house system and you can check it out on pennytalk.com

Well - seeing as you have an in house solution it really comes down to how the application was built. Many developers now use OOP. In a modular design PayPal integration shouldn't be too tough. If on the other hand the application is strung together with tape and bondo it could be difficult to add a new payment method.

Unfortunately, the developer who wrote the source code is going to be the only one who really can give you an accurate quotation of the time/money involved unless you can release the source to have other developers look into it.

Good luck!

Thanks... I am just going to keep pushing the developers to get it done. They are great guys... just a little overworked sometimes but PayPal integration will definately be worth the development time and I just have to get everyone in my company to realize this.

It's definitely worth the development time and the evidence will be in the additional revenue you see for your efforts.