Paypal Encrypted Website payments

Question

I am trying to integrate a PayPal Website Payments Standard > Cart Upload payment type into my shopping cart. I integrated Google Checkout a while back and I did not find it overly confusing as I do paypal.

I am getting info on how to encrypt it from here: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_encryptedwebpayments#id08A3I0P017Q

Paypal says I need to generate a private key and a public certificate using OpenSSL. I went to OpenSSL and downloaded the latest release, which is just a folder containing various files but I see no application I can use, not sure what to do here.

Even if I were to get OpenSSL to generate me a private key and public cert, the next step is to download either an MS or Java command line tool to create the encrypted cart ahead of time with the cart-total, tax, etc. which sounds crazy to me, like I am supposed to manually do this prior to every order??

Obviously I do not know the items in the cart the customer is going to buy before hand so I need this to be done on the fly on my website using PHP. But I am completely lost. There has to be a way to setup dynamic secure cart uploads to paypal. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Firstly, your problem with OpenSSL. If you use linux or Mac it is easy (as always). Install the package as usual and use the command on the paypal instructions page. On Windows, make sure you are downloading binaries not source from this page.

You do not need to use the Java programme they provide to generate the links. That part of the instruction sheet is for people making static pages, not using PHP. PayPal is a big solution that gives you a huge amount of flexibility, but they do that by providing you with lots of different APIs and ways of handling payments. EWPs (encrypted website payments), in the link you posted, are not what you are looking for.

It has been a couple of years now since I used PayPal in a solution for a customer. Last time, there was a separate API to do what you are asking called PDT (Payment data transfer). The API has changed a bit since I last used it, and the documentation seems to have moved around since I last downloaded it, but there is still the 'website payments standard integration guide' and 'order management integration guide'. Those still have the instructions you are looking for I think.

The short answer is that generating the encrypted links yourself to build a custom solution is very possible with PayPal, but you do have to do some work to make it happen. The docs are hard to find on the site