Has anyone found payment processor documentation very poor

Question

Does anyone else find that the documentation of a lot of payment processors have poor or incomplete documentation as to how to use their API? Or it's just plain confusing?

Recently I have setup both PayPal and Beanstream and found that both are either confusing or don't include full documentation.

For example, in the BeanStream documentation, they say they will return a "message_id", which is great, but no where do they tell you what the different id's mean. It also comes with some text, so you can start creating a list, but there is no way to check to ensure you get either a valid one or the one that means it was successful.

Has anyone had this experience?

Edit: I will agree that when you email them they are helpful, but unfortunately most of them are only open normal business hours for general tech support (other than emergency) which isn't always useful as that isn't when it seems like I do my integration.

Answer 1

well, this isn't really specific to payment processor documentation, in that, all things being equal, well documented APIs will help encourage development. for what it's worth, i've worked with paypal, authorize.net, ups, and usps APIs, and didn't find them overtly confusing (not implying that they were a particular joy to get through).

that being said, i wish more documentation was like PHP's. despite it being such a scattered language, the documentation is really quite good.

Answer 2

I've only worked with PayPal, but the simple version (where you just set up an HTML form on your web page and submit it with the PayPal button) is super-easy to work with. And if you're looking for near real-time payment feedback, I always found it easier to just write a program to check my PayPal email account periodically, and parse payment details from the body of the email itself.

Answer 3

Having worked with a lot of APIs, not only for payment processors but for lots of other ecommerce related web services, I have to say to that while the docs can be less than stellar, they usually aren't that bad, and if you send them an email or give them a call, they will usually be pretty helpful.

Answer 4

I have found the documentation and code examples from Authorize.net and Nova's ViaKlix very helpful. I stay away from PayPal.

Answer 5

This may not be much help to you, but as you get more an more experienced w/in particular domain the interfaces get easier. By weird twist of world, I've coded a whole bunch of credit card interfaces, and once you kind of get the lingo they all work the same.

The only other suggestion I would offer is to avail yourself of support resources in addition too the documentation provided. We recently worked with a relatively well known payment gateway, and while their documentation completely sucked (by their own admission as well), the support staff was incredibly knowledgable and more than willing to help out/explain.

Answer 6

I've had to use Authorize.net for several sites and the supplied documentation is 'just ok' assuming you are working in the somewhat limited technology sets that they supply sample code for. It was a breeze to get it up and running with PHP but considerably lacking when trying to pull off the same thing in ColdFusion.

Several other sites done via PayPal which IMO was a much better experience.

Answer 7

PayPal is a nightmare when it comes to setting up and testing the test account (Sandbox).

Answer 8

Re: Beanstream you have to login then you'll see the documentation link on the left hand side. The design is so '90s and they recommend using IE.

Re: Paypal I adapted this code from http://www.php-suit.com/paypal for my Zend Framework project. Note: you've got to have ssl:// socket transport wrapper registered otherwise (visible in phpinfo()) you'll have to tweak the code to use curl.

Here is how to get the code using SVN

svn checkout http://paypalphp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ paypalphp-read-only