Question

I have been making a hotel booking software that calculates, for given dates and specifications, a price for staying at a hotel. I’m looking to use Paypal for accepting the payment, but having browsed their website, can’t find a solution that seems to be compatible with this.

Since the price is dynamic, it’s not like a normal one-price product which Paypal seems to handle best. I need a method where I can send the cost to Paypal, have Paypal charge the customer, then have Paypal send a confirmation back to the website that the payment has processed correctly at which point the booking is complete.

I presume Paypal is capable of handling a dynamically priced item like this. Could anyone point me in the direction of where I should be looking?

Answer 1

I just completed this process in my current website: bpremium.com, basically I built a webservice api for the payment process where it can send commands over javascript until it gets to the last stage, which is where you build the form you send to paypal.

in order to record the payment, you setup another webservice for the notify url and this will catch all the $_POST data and process it into your database.

<form id="form-payment-paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick" />
<input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-BuyNowBF" />
<input type="hidden" name="charset" value="utf-8" />
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="YOUR_ACCOUNT_EMAIL_ADDRESS" />
<input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="THE PRODUCT NAME" />
<input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="YOUR_RECOGNISABLE_SALE_ID?>" />
<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="EUR" />
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="THE LANGUAGE CODE: es_ES, en_GB, etc" />
<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="<?=$amount+($amount*0.04)?>" />
<input type="hidden" name="return" value="/payment/complete/" />
<input type="hidden" name="notify_url" value="/webservice/payment/notify/paypal/" />

<p class="ac span300">
    <input  type="submit" class="form-style-bt" value="PAY" />
</p>
</form>

that is basically what we use, you can see we put the $amount + $amount*0.04 because you needed to add a 4% surcharge in spain, where I am. perhaps thats different in your code.

I think the rest of it is pretty self explanatory.

on the /webservice/ url, you need to record everything into your database, it sends you the information whether it succeeded or failed, but it’s not a call to your website, you won’t see this page, it’s a “back channel” call to your website, so it’s not your landing page, it’s simple the url paypal sends all the raw data to, you’re supposed to record it, process it and perhaps send out emails, etc.

then if the user returns to your website, you land on the /payment/complete page, so this page could show the result, whether everything is ok, or something failed.

hope it helps.