PayPal doesn’t do discounts

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I can't believe it, I really can't!

I'm writing a shopping cart for a website. One of the features required is to give the user an X amount discount off their next order when they buy a specific product. So let's say the user has a £20 discount on their next order, how does PayPal let me apply that? Simple answer, it doesn't!

You can't send a cart line with a negative price "Discount for 20 GBP", nor can you send a cart line with a positive price but a negative quantity (that was desperation). The way to do this apparently is to send a cart total. YES! By sending the entire order aggregated into a single order line. NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

So PayPal wants my user to order £100 of goods, click Check-out, and then be presented with "Total for your order £100 (£20 discount)", that's it? In my opinion, that's not very good. In fact, considering PayPal is probably the largest Internet payment organisation in the world I consider this to be atrocious!

Oh well, back to it...

Comments

Nick Crisp said…
While we're ont he subject of PayPal bashing - I've just had to integrate a website with PayPal Payments Pro using the .Net data objects.

The sample code for recurring payments is wrong

Sample Recurr.Frequency = "MONTH"

Actual Recurr.Frequency = "MNTH"

Also required fields are not mentioned - so you have to keep adding data to fields until you get it to work.
The sample code also does not include data for all the required fields.

The sandbox testing server just returns sucess as long as the card number is ok, it doesn't check expiry dates. So when I switched to the live server, my payments were failing as the expiry date was in the wrong format.

Didn't look good with the client.

All in all it was a very disappointing experience.

Nick
7 April 2009 at 19:09
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