Hi all!
We need help with the direction after spending multiple days trying to resolve it on our own.
We are building a marketplace where buyers meet sellers (think of eBay but for a specific niche). We want to facilitate a transaction where the buyer can buy a seller’s product and notify us about finished transaction. It is critical for us to know that the transaction succeeded or failed. We want to use PayPal to facilitate that.
We’ve been trying 3 different approaches but none produced desired results:
Regular Express Checkout: cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECGettingStarted doesn’t work for us because it requires full authentication of the vendor’s account at the transaction time. Since we are going to serve multiple sellers, we can’t bother them to provide authentication at the transaction time.
Button integration using: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ButtonMgrAPIIntro In this case we send the user to PayPal to finish transaction (which is fine), but we need to know how to get a transaction id and get its status. PayPal requires the seller’s authentication (as in #1) and doesn’t provide this info. There should be a way to query for this info. We couldn’t find a way to do it.
Accelerated boarding: blog.earlyimpact.com/2009/12/paypal-express-checkout-accelerated.html . We tried to make it work for us, but no success. It is also unclear if it is an official release supported by PayPal.
We are confident that this process should be workable with public PayPal APIs since we see other marketplaces providing this basic feature (Bonanzle.com for example) and notifying the buyer/seller about transaction id.
Please, help us with direction!!!
Thanks a lot to all your kind and brave hearts willing to help….