User's Manual
Table Of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- PayPal Payments Overview
- Getting Started
- PayPal Account Optional
- Creating Buy Now and Donation Buttons
- Creating Shopping Cart Buttons
- Adding PayPal to Your Third- party Shopping Cart
- Custom Payment Pages
- Calculating Shipping, Handling, and Tax
- Creating Customer Contact Telephone
- Auto Return
- Backend Integration - Payment Notifications
- Using Multiple Currencies
- Language Encoding for Your Data
- Testing
- Processing eChecks
- Security
- HTML Samples
- IPN and PDT Variables
- About These Tables of Variables
- test_ipn Variable in Sandbox
- IPN Variables in All Posts
- Buyer Information
- Basic Information
- Advanced and Custom Information
- Shopping Cart Information
- Currency and Currency Exchange
- Auctions
- Mass Payment
- Subscriptions Variables
- Dispute Notification Variables
- PDT-Specific Variables
- Country Codes
Merchant User Manual and Integration Guide May, 2005 23
PayPal Payments Overview
Contact Telephone Number
2
For more information about shipping and tax, see Chapter 9, “Calculating Shipping, Handling,
and Tax.”
Contact Telephone Number
The Customer Contact Information Telephone field provides merchants with a contact
telephone number for their buyer. In accordance with our User Agreement, merchants may
only use this Contact Telephone Number to communicate with buyers about the related
purchase. This number may not be used for unsolicited commercial messages.
Auto Return
Auto Return for Website Payments allows merchants to eliminate the Payment Receipt page in
the Website Payments flow and automatically return or redirect buyers to their website upon
payment completion.
For more information about Auto Return, see Chapter 11, “Auto Return.”
Back-end Integration Methods
There are two back-end integration methods, Instant Payment Notification and Payment Data
Transfer.
Instant Payment Notification
PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN) allows you to integrate PayPal payments with
your website's back-end operations. IPN provides immediate notification and confirmation of
PayPal's payments you receive, allowing you to:
z Customize your website's response to customer purchases in real-time.
z Track customers through the notification's pass through variables.
z Automate your fulfillment operations.
z Store transaction information in your own database.
Once you activate IPN, you will receive an IPN when a payment is first received that will
display the status of the payment (Completed or Pending). If the payment status was Pending,
you will receive another IPN when the payment clears, fails, or is denied.
IPN can be seamlessly integrated with each of the PayPal Website Payments solutions (Buy
Now Buttons, PayPal Shopping Cart, Subscriptions and Recurring Payments, and Donations),
as well as with regular PayPal Send Money and Mass Pay payments, and lets you focus on
selling, not on manually tracking your orders.