XF 2.2 PayPal payments via API (credit card)?

[NealC]

People don't care for PayPal and too many have canceled due to their public nonsense not long ago. I use PayPal on my main ecommerce web site to take credit cards, people don't know that I'm using PayPal, they don't leave the site to pay and then return to the site. I'd prefer to take credit card payments for user upgrades on my XF 2.x site and not need to go sign up with another provider when I have my business solutions already setup with PayPal via their API.

Can XF add a credit card integration to take credit cards directly? I think this would be a much better purchasing experience as well as any time you leave the site it's never a good thing.

 

[cdub]

Stripe will allow you to do this. I think PayPal forces you to their site.

 

[Old Nick]

Managing payments, credit cards, financial flows, claims is a job and I don't think it's in XenForo's interest to embark on such an adventure!

 

[Rhody]

Stripe works well for me, although the XF interface is very limiting. (stripe is capable of so much more)

 

[NealC]

PayPal is probably one of the largest providers, I'm surprised we don't have Credit Card processing integrated in XF.

 

[Kirby]

I'm surprised we don't have Credit Card processing integrated in XF.

I am not surprised at all. Payment processing IMHO is a security / data protection / regulation nightmare and I am happy we don't have to deal with that "directly".

Besides that I personally wouldn't trust $RandomWebsite$ enough to pay via credit card, but PayPal would be fine.

 

[cdub]

People trusty random website all the time. The Stripe integration is quite good except for the subscription management after purchase which could use a lot of help.

 

[TPerry]

People trusty random website all the time.

and people get ripped off all the time.
I think his point was for the end user, routing through PayPal is a better security option. Have you ever noticed that many of the "big name" providers route you to PayPal to complete the transaction?
NameSilo
Hetzner
Digital Ocean
Agena Astro
High Point Scientific
are just a few of the ones I use... and they all divert you to PayPal to complete the transaction. Guess what two of the primary reasons for that is?

 

[woody]

Stripe will allow you to do this. I think PayPal forces you to their site.

Paypal has the ability to manage the CC transactions without the user even knowing they used Paypal. I just finished a :30 phone call with Paypal to set this up. Lower fees too.

This would be a nice addition to Xenforo.

 

[NealC]

I use Paypal Payflow Pro and that's what I was hoping to integrate. In the end Stripe looks like a great system and I may even move my ecommerce to it. I just got a notification from Paypal that they'll soon support Apple pay etc.

Starting April 25, 2023, PayPal will offer Apple Pay on Website Payments Standard (WPS) in certain guest checkout experiences for eligible consumers. This feature will be automatically enabled as part of your existing WPS integration at no extra cost - included at your current PayPal rate.

 

[digitalpoint]

Irrespective of credit cards, it's long overdue for XenForo to be doing PayPal stuff via API (I suggested it in 2011). Their NVP API since been deprecated, but they have APIs that allow you to do "all the things" and eliminate IPNs (which are problematic for a variety of reasons... for example you can't change the IPN URL after the fact if you change the domain of your site). Their new API uses webhooks, and you can choose what events to subscribe to (and change the subscription URL).

One nice thing is that XenForo has abstracted the payment system out to support more than just PayPal (the old days it was only PayPal), and the stuff XenForo has in place already makes it relatively trivial to simply add a new payment handler (I've actually done this and you can leverage the payment_callback.php URL as your webhook destination). The payment handler system already has methods for subscription cancelation (used for other payment providers), so that could finally become a thing for PayPal as well (allowing users to cancel subscriptions without digging through constantly changing locations in PayPal their account).

You can utilize the validateTransaction() method in the payment handler to handle incoming webhook notifications like so:



The payment handler I built it way more than what a normal XenForo site would need/use (for example merchant onboarding you can see right there).... merchants being the site's users if they are selling things on your site.

Back to the original post, yes... you can also do credit card processing on the site itself via PayPal with API calls as long as you have the right type of account (the user never leaves your site or knows anything about PayPal... they are just entering their credit card number on your site).

PayPal Developer

PayPal API reference

developer.paypal.com