Andrew Angell Receives the PayPal Star Developer Award…Again!
Andrew Angell, Co-Owner and Developer at USBSwiper, has received the PayPal Star Developer Award for the 3rd time in 4 years (2008, 2009, 2011). He is recognized for his efforts on the PayPal developer community boards to help application developers of all kinds integrate PayPal into their solutions.
Here he is on stage receiving his award at the X.Commerce event from John Donahoe and Naveed Anwar.
USBSwiper for Magento Now Available!
Overview
The much anticipated point of sale, credit card swipe module for Magento by USBSwiper is now available! Now online shoppers and Magento store owners can easily checkout using their credit card and USB credit card reader. Save time and avoid errors with our USBSwiper Module for Magento!
PayPal Credit Card Solutions Through a Small Card Swiping Device
PayPal Card Processing
PayPal has succeeded in markets where other companies haven’t by simplifying their customer’s workflow. That’s what it’s done for transactions over the web. For those that aren’t familiar with what PayPal is at its core, it’s a way of sending money over the web, with your email address being the key identifier of the sender and the recipient of the funds. Effectively, what you experience is that somebody “emails you money.” Of course, it doesn’t technically happen that way, but that’s how it plays out with the user.
It’s this simplicity in experience and approach that PayPal has applied to several traditional business areas and has had great success. What many people don’t know is that PayPal has also been providing point of sale credit card merchant services for years through their Virtual Terminal setup and more recently VT Swipe. The red tape’s all but eliminated with PayPal, as they don’t impose the sort of setup fees, minimum transaction volume fees, or cancellation charges that you get with conventional merchant service providers. Everything is out in the open about PayPal credit card processing. When it comes to PayPal, there are no complicated variable scales or if-then situations about additional auxiliary fees and charges.
And then came along USBSwiper who’s fresh approach to the PayPal point of sale processing system made taking credit cards, faster, cheaper and better.
How to Test PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
Some of the questions I see most in the PayPal developer forum regarding IPN is how to initially configure it and test it. In a previous blog I posted a PHP IPN template that you can use to get passed most of the configuration hurdles. Testing your solution is another story, though. Here are the steps I like to take to ensure flawless IPN integration.
1 – Local IPN Testing
The first thing I do is create a local HTML form that consists of hidden fields which resemble the same thing PayPal’s system would post to my server when an IPN occurs. Here’s a sample.
[sourcecode language="html"]
[/sourcecode]
When testing this way, the IPN script will run through your Invalid IPN code because the post did not come from PayPal’s server. As such, you’ll need to adjust your IPN script to force a Valid response. If you’re using my IPN template you can adjust line 56 to…
[sourcecode language="php"]
if(strcmp ($res, “VERIFIED”) == 0 || 1 == 1)
[/sourcecode]
Then, simply set the action of the form to your IPN listener and then submit it. This way you’ll be able to see the on-screen result of your IPN script and can easily troubleshoot any errors that may exist. You can add or remove any fields you’d like from the test form and you can adjust the names according to what fields you expect to get from the IPN you’re testing for. Once you’re able to successfully run your test IPN within a browser without any errors you can remove the forced Validity and move on to the next step.
2 – PayPal Developer IPN Simulator
PayPal provides an IPN Simulator from within your developer account. You can use the simulator to easily send test IPN’s to your server for a number of different scenarios. At this point you’ll just need to make sure your IPN script is configured to run on the sandbox servers (see the notes at the top of the IPN template) and then these IPN Simulator posts will validate because they are indeed coming from PayPal’s server. Once these simulated IPN’s are working as expected you’re ready to launch.
3 – Deploy
At this point you’re ready to set your IPN script to production mode instead of sandbox mode and then upload it to your live web server. You can enable IPN within your PayPal profile or you can also include the NotifyURL field in your standard payment buttons or API requests to PayPal.
Real-Life Example of the Advantage of PayPal’s Dispute Resolution Center
When you use PayPal as your credit card processing merchant you are protected in many different ways. Standard protection such as Address Verification System (AVS) and Credit Card Security Digits (CVV2) are provided and in most cases should be enough to avoid any problems. However, mistakes happen and sometimes merchandise can be shipped when it should not have been. PayPal’s Dispute Resolution Center can help insure that you will not lose your product in the event of a charge-back due to fraudulant activity. Here’s one example…
The only ATM machine near my home for my bank is located inside a local Price Chopper grocery store. I stopped by to get some cash out of my account one day and while in a rush made a very stupid mistake and left my debit card in the ATM machine. I got back home just about 30 minutes later and I realized what I had done. I immediately went back up to the Price Chopper and went to the customer service desk. They had my debit card there for me and gave it back. Whew!
The next day I logged into my online banking just to make sure nothing funny had happened. Sure enough, I discovered a $3,000 charge to a kitchen and bath web site for a bunch of cabinets that was NOT mine! I immediately called my bank and submitted a dispute on the transaction. They gave me a temporary refund of the funds, explained that an investigation would ensue and that it could take up to 90 days before it was completely settled. I asked “What about this kitchen and bath company? Is anybody going to notify them that this was a fraudulant charge?” I was insured that yes, they would indeed be informed, but it might not be for weeks.
Well, at this point I was feeling pretty stupid about leaving my debit card in the ATM machine and I was also curious about the seller and who might have done this with my card. I personally called the kitchen & bath company and informed them of the fraudulant transaction. Now, even though I made a dumb mistake and left my card in the machine, this is where the seller messed up. They proceeded to ship the merchandise to an address in New Jersey even though the billing address on the credit card (which was included in the order, apparently) was in the Kansas City area, where I’m from. This was a big mistake. Had I not personally called to inform the seller that the fraudulant transaction had taken place the merchandie would have reached its destination and the fraudsters could have very well have gotten away with the product. By the time the bank’s investigation made it back to the seller it would have been too late. The credit card company would then take the funds back from the seller to cover what they put back into my account. Because of the fact that the seller had shipped to an address other than the billing address on the credit card (an AVS mis-match, or as PayPal would call it, and Unconfirmed address) they would not have been covered by any type of seller protection from that credit card merchant. At this point they would have been out their product and the $3,000. Needless to say, they were very pleased that I called and informed them of the problem in time for them to put a stop-shipment on the merchandise and get it routed back to their warehouse. Again, had I not called and informed the seller of this problem they would have had no idea it was fraudulant until the bank contacted them up to 90 days later. With PayPal’s Dispute Resolution Center this would not have been a problem.
The Dispute Resolution Center is an area of your PayPal account where you can easily manage any disputes/chargebacks that might occur from transactions you have processed. In the example above, if the seller had used PayPal to process the credit card they would have received a new dispute notification when I initially filed the charge-back with my bank. Then, even if I hadn’t called them to inform them of the problem they would have gotten notification from the PayPal dispute area and would have still had time to put a stop-shipment on the goods. Also, with PayPal’s new Expanded Seller Protection program the seller may have been eligble even after shipping to the Unconfirmed address. If not, there would have been red flags in the transaction details page within the PayPal account warning the seller not to ship the merchandise without further investigation.
This is just one example of how using PayPal as your merchant processor can save valuable time and keep dispute losses to a minimum.
