Question

I have an application writted in ASP with a simple form. The users fill up the form with their PayPal ID to receive money exchanging their points.

I want to verify the PayPal ID before they submit the form using some kind of http request. I have looking into the PayPal API but i didn’t find anything.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If the PayPal api doesn’t support a “verify” of call, then here’s the usual alternative:

1. Create a “paypal_ids” database table in your application
2. When a PayPal id is entered by someone, check your table to see if you have already validated the id for a previous transaction. If you have, then you’re all set. — You could also keep bad ids in the table, to act as a negative cache.
3. To validate a paypal id, just attempt to do a real transaction against the id, where you try to “send” 1 penny to the id. If it works, then you’ve validated the id. Store your results in your table and go on from there.

This is how paypal validates checking accounts–by doing a small, but real, test transaction.