I am designing a donation form for a political campaign. Usually, with a donation paypal link, I do not require specific information about the user. However, with political campaign donations, there are laws that I need to observe.
I cannot seem to find information on how to add some mandatory fields to my form and still have a paypal submit option. I need to know the person's name, address, phone number, and business name.
Ideas?
Paypal's documentation describes how to add one or more text fields to a donation button link to doc
But a heads up - we've been using this successfully for years and just recently we have been getting an increasing number of transactions where this field is not being sent through to the transaction detail. We suspect that it may be that paypal has been streamlining their donation flow and are no longer recognizing these added fields.
Related
When an order is created at Shopify, a callback is initiated from Shopify that hits the webhook given in the settings.
The parameters that it uses to hit the webhook, those contain multiple emails, and there are no docs for those.
You can see those parameters here: https://codebeautify.org/jsonviewer/cb3e0c52
One email is in the root. 2nd is by the name contact_email, and the third one falls under customer and goes by the name: email.
As of now, there is no documentation that states which email stands for what.
My question is: how would I know which email has the customer used for purchasing the product, and it would be the very email that I will use for contacting back with a customer.
Shopify webhooks: https://help.shopify.com/en/api/reference/events/webhook
You can do the following. One. Check to make sure a customer record was attached to the order. Surprisingly, it has been known to happen that you get an order without a customer due to a glitch. Assuming you have a customer record, use the email field from that. If the customer record does not exist, the one at the root is likely your best bet.
That is it. Any other emails floating around can be safely ignored by you. And also, be double dog sure you do not email this customer unless you are allowed to. Otherwise, you are spamming, and that will get you hammer-banned by the merchant, who will take the brunt of the abuse from your spam.
That means checking the buyer_accepts_marketing attribute.
We ship using FEDEX and UPS, and we never found a need to post the tracking number to the payment record, however, recently a customer did a charge-back and the claim was that the order was not shipped even though it was. The tracking number was not entered into paypal, but we do have a tracking number for this order. Do we need to manually enter every tracking number into Paypal, or do we have a chance to enter it after a chargeback attempt has been made?
PayPal's standard API does not provide a field for tracking numbers in their order details, so there is no way to automatically send PayPal this information for all orders.
Their API supports disputes, so it could be possible, however it looks like it could be very messy. The workflow would look like this:
Use PayPal's Customer Disputes API to GET all disputes with a dispute_state of REQUIRED_ACTION and reason of MERCHANDISE_OR_SERVICE_NOT_RECEIVED. Save the Order ID
Cross reference the Order ID with your order management software's API to get a tracking number. If the tracking number exists,
Use PayPal's Customer Disputes API to escalate the dispute to a claim and save the returned claim API endpoint.
The documentation gets a little fuzzy here and may require some contact ith PayPal's support team, but it looks like you should be able to POST evidence to the claim with PROOF_OF_FULFILLMENT, which includes tracking_number and carrier_name.
Unless you are processing a high volume of these missing order claims it probably won't make sense to go through all this legwork. If it truly is taking a lot of time and energy for you or your staff to handle this specific type of PayPal dispute then maybe it would be worthwhile. I might also suggest in this case to start toggling the "signature required" settings for your shipping partners.
I have a requirement to do 3rd party age verification before I ship an order. I'm using a company called EVS for this. They released a shopify app recently, but seems partly baked. It requires a user to enter date of birth when registering for an account and then triggers the verification when the user places an order. The main problem with that is that it's rare for a customer to actually create an account before ordering for the first time -- instead they order first, then shopify emails them to create an account after the fact. Creating the account afterward does not allow the customer to enter DOB.
So I'm planning to implement my own solution. I can use EVS's API to run the verification by sending a combination of Name, Address, DOB, DL# and State, and last 4 of SSN. I have already built a proprietary order management system that pulls in customer and order data, and I can write a client to perform the verification.
I'm less savvy on the shopify side. I need to balance customer friction when placing an order for the first time, against having to do a lot of manual work for verification.
Below are the options I have conceived. Are there any other options? Any ideas for a better solution? Keep in mind I need to verify a customer once. I can tag the customer account as verified, and once verified it's business as usual.
Alter shopify templates to only show the checkout button when a user is logged in. If not logged in, show a "Create an account" button instead. That way the user provides DOB during account creation and the EVS app works as designed.
Set up a separate verification site like verify.my-domain.com. I can trigger an email to the customer upon order creation and ask them to verify. (May have issues with incorrect email addresses or spam filtering.)
If customer is not logged in, or account is not age verified, and they click Checkout, I can redirect them to a page. I can use a form on the page to do the verification. If verification passes, send them on to checkout.
For option 3, I don't know what shopify allows or what best practices allow. Can I use js to pass data to my own server on a different subdomain? Or post the form to another subdomain and then redirect back to shopify?
I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.
You have pretty much summed up all your options, to clarify on them a little:
You can require that customers create an account in the store checkout settings. /admin/settings/checkout
This would work, you could iframe it in too on a custom Page. Or, better, use cross-domain calls or jsonp.
This is a little convoluted and you would have to persist and maintain lot of external state. I'd avoid this
I think a combination of 1 and 2. Turn on "require customer account". Modify the customer account creation page. Implement a cross domain policy with your server which will host custom code leveraging the EVS API.
I'm not sure if you are selling tangible goods or not but with stringent policies on users' age you have to bear in mind that shipping addresses could change. For a tight integration you should look at having webhooks whenever a customer is changed and make sure all their data is still valid since their last EVS approval.
I've been looking into this quite extensively and we've spent a number of hours experimenting with options. Our client in this case is on Shopify Plus so we do have the benefit of access to checkout.liquid.
Our research has led us to believe that one cannot pass the required 'customer note' of the date of birth to the checkout should they be attempting to checkout as a 'guest'. Perhaps because the 'customer' does not yet exist.
Our options have been narrowed down to:
Write a custom backend app that allows Shopify and EVS to communicate directly (XML API on the EVS side) in the checkout process or just prior and then pass the verification status back to Shopify to allow the order to proceed, or append some relevant status marker for the fulfillment department to act accordingly. The EVS app doesn't prevent the order from proceeding, but does flag the customer's age as unverified in the Risk Level panel in the admin. This would be quite a substantial project and by no means low hanging fruit. There is also risk of re-doing a lot of what the EVS app does already and running into they same obstacles they did.
Force customers to register prior to checkout (if not signed in). This seems the most viable approach. The only caveat being that existing customers will not have the customer note (birth date) and we'd need to build a smaller backend app to allow them to append this to their customer account via the Shopify API (this cannot be done via liquid).
These are our findings and I'd love to know more about how you ended up approaching this.
We are using PayPal website payment pro and we can send money live and all is well.
Our issues are:
when we view the recent payment, it should say "payment from John Smith"...but ours just say "payment from". the name of the person does not show up. well our accounting section wants it back. :-) not sure why its not or which parameter of the DoDirectPayment request I need for this.
The user submission form has an invoice number field. I also need the invoice number to show on the details page of the PayPal payment receipt. I was able to get stuff like shipping address to show up by using its parameter, but no idea to have Invoice Number show up.
I know it can be done because the old website had these and they used website payments pro API to send payments. I just am not sure of how to do this. thee is no mention of this in the API references that I see, especially for DoDirectPayments method. Any help appreciated
Norman
I am trying to find a way of sending email invoice via google checkout's API (and also in PayPal)
I can't find how. or at least how to generate a new order (money request)
thank you
From: http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checkout_Comparison_Part_I.html
Requesting Payment by Email Invoices
What is it? Email invoicing lets you sell without an online store. Buyers can place orders from you by phone, fax, email or other offline means; then you send email invoices from the Merchant Center to the buyers requesting payment. Email invoices contain a personalized message from you regarding the requested payment as well as a "Pay now through Google Checkout" link. When buyers click this link, they are brought to Google Checkout where they can complete the payment process.
Best for: Use this option if you don't have or need an online store.
Time required: There's no setup — just open a Google Checkout merchant account and you can immediately start sending invoices.
Technical skills required: None. Just Internet access.
Demo: Email Invoice and Wizard (requires sign-up)
Processing Orders: (Part II) Once orders start coming in, use the Merchant Center to charge orders and update order status.
Next Step: How to request payments by email invoices
From what I've seen, looks like they don't have a way to do this through an API. Hopefully someday they will, but for now I think I'll have to create my own email with a link to my own page that sends them to google checkout via a custom Buy It Now button.
It's too bad - it'd be so simple to just be able to call send_email(name, email, amount, message) and have it be the same as logging in & doing it through the Merchant Center.
I do understand the rationale a little - if you're capable of creating an automated invoicing system that can call a google API to send emails, then you should also be capable of creating a link, custom button, and letting the user checkout that way. I still want it though - I'm lazy.
Can you submit the form data in the way that the google checkout portal does? then it would authenticate and autofill the form?