PayPal

Integrate with the PayPal APIs

It’s easy to create a “Buy now” PayPal button and slap it on your application. The problem is that to find out what really happened when your customer went to PayPal, you have to wait for the IPN to come back to your server. Wouldn’t you like to know as soon as your customer came back to your site whether the payment went through? Of course you would!

The PayPal Express Checkout API make it possible for your application to create a payment request, redirect your customer to PayPal, and then immediately query PayPal on the results of the transaction when your customer returns to your site. Then you can immediately give your customer the download link to your e-book, or grant access to your content, or whatever.

On top of that, the PayPal Direct Payment API allows you to use your PayPal account that has been enabled with Website Payments Pro to take credit card information at your site and have PayPal handle the credit card transaction behind the scenes, keeping your customer at your site and giving you an immediate result on whether the transaction was successful. It looks to your customer just like it would if you had set up a merchant account to take credit cards with your bank, but the money goes to your PayPal account.

The PayPal Rails Kit makes it easy for you to add PayPal payment processing to your Rails application. This Rails Kit is a simple and straightforward tutorial on how to integrate these PayPal APIs and how to get your PayPal developer account set up for testing. The PayPal Rails Kit is a full, working implementation of the PayPal APIs using Ruby on Rails. Once you download the Kit you can start it up with your PayPal developer account information and see it in action right away. The code is clear and straightforward, so you can easily take sample implementation and integrate it into your existing Rails project, or even start a new Rails project right on top of the Kit.