Is it possible to retrieve shipping quotes on the fly through an external API when a user purchases something through my eBay store?
eBay (and previously PayPal) does not expose the shipping quotes API for various reasons (including technical, business, and pricing reasons) so the short answer is "no, there is no way". In fact it gets the quotes from an external (independent) source.
You can try integrating with Pitney Bowes or a similar provider to get the shipping quotes but that solution is for large players.
UPDATE: Since your company is the one hosting the quote service...
When a user purchaes an item on ebay a "purchase notification" is sent out to a merchant. There are a few different versions of it which you can read about on eBay's dev site. One of them is ItemSold Notification that you can use.
UPDATE 2:
If I understand you correctly you are trying to inject some business logic into eBay's purchasing UI? I'm afraid you are out of luck here. You have limited (pretty much none) influence on the eBay's web flow.
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I'm a fairly new web developer and I have an ecommerce website that integrates EasyPost to create and print shipping labels.
EasyPost has an API. Also, in each shipping label, I see a JavaScript object (I think) that displays buyer_address... "email": "example#gmail.com",, which tells me that the email information is there.
My question is somewhat general in scope: What steps would I need to take to go about creating this automation? The website is built in Webflow, so I don't really have a "codebase" or "repository" to store whatever code is needed to build the automation.
Since the buyer email is making it into EasyPost with integrations already in place, I feel that I could create a simple program that emails the tracking number to the buyer email every time a label is generated, or perhaps when package is shipped, without the program needing to interact with Webflow or other integrations.
I attempted using Zapier, as well as Make.com. Neither worked, and OrderDesk doesn't have a way to send tracking number emails.
It looks like Webflow has some kind of support for Webhooks (https://webflow.com/feature/create-webhooks-from-project-settings). EasyPost offers webhooks for free as an add-on service. Basically, with webhooks, EasyPost would send tracking events to Webflow proactively, but Webflow (or you) would need to manage the logic for what to do with those tracking events after they are delivered.
EasyPost Webhook Guide
I'm unaware of any off the shelf products that could do this for you without writing any code. We have a guide that details how you might accomplish this with Ruby (you could then follow this as an example for any other language): https://www.easypost.com/email-tracking-tutorial
A few suggestions:
Integrate something into Webflow if possible (I'm unfamiliar with the platform so couldn't say).
Build a simple script that runs on a schedule (cronjob) that retrieves your trackers from EasyPost and sends an email to customers if they have not yet received one. To your point, this approach wouldn't require interacting with Webflow at all and could be done with some local code running on a server and just your EasyPost API key.
I've created a simple UI for EasyPost: https://github.com/Justintime50/easypost-tools-ui, it could be interesting to add this particular use-case as a feature to that project. If you're interested, feel free to open an issue on GitHub for the repo listed here and I'd consider it.
You'd use easypost's API webhooks, to detect when shipment tracking information is provided, or package information is updated.
https://www.easypost.com/docs/api#trackers
It looks like it has a lot of states, so you can keep the client updated regarding the package status from the moment the tracking # is assigned;
EZ1000000001 pre_transit
EZ2000000002 in_transit
EZ3000000003 out_for_delivery
EZ4000000004 delivered
EZ5000000005 return_to_sender
EZ6000000006 failure
EZ7000000007 unknown
You can install webhooks from these docs.
To send the email, you can use an automation service e.g. Make to capture those webhook events, and then compose and send an email to that customer. I like MailJet for that purpose, because it has excellent template support and you can send from your own company domain. But there are many email-sending options.
A bigger challenge, maybe, is getting the email address to send to. I didn't spot it glancing through the Trackers or Shipments data structures, and I am primarily seeing physical address info.
If EasyPost is not tracking the customer's email with the shipment, you may have some challenge in that you'd need to capture the client info through Webflow's order webhooks, and then associate that with EasyPost's shipmentid, and store those in a reference table.
Many automation services offer database-like functionality for this purpose, or you could use e.g. google sheets ( columns webflow OrderID, easypost ShipmentID, customer Email ) or airtable for that purpose.
But you'd have to look into the Easypost integration as well, and you may need to make that integration manual so that you can acquire all 3 of those pieces of information at the same point in your business data flow.
Implementing Paypal for a UK based NGO where they are selling certain services plus accepting donations.
I am using REST API for selling services which is working well but do we use the same API for Donation as well. I would like to handle Gift Aids as well. I dont see any payment type option within the API.
If I use the standard Donation button, how do I get the transaction Id and other values back so that I can save them in my system.
There is no real technical difference between donations and payments for goods and services. (The donations button is just a few cosmetic differences on top of a regular website payments standard or EC payment experience.) The REST is not yet as feature rich as the older payment flows and may not have those same cosmetic tweaks available, but you can definitely use either the REST or the classic API for both services and donations.
I would recommend not using both REST and classic together on your site; you will encounter many annoyances due to differences in the underlying models. It is not just the initial payment integration that is different; the payment IDs are different, the APIs you can use to manage the payment lifecycle are different etc.
As one such example, to answer your question #2 you cannot get REST-style payment IDs for non-REST transactions. You get back classic transaction IDs in the payment redirect or the DoEC API response, depending upon which integration you use. You also get classic payment IDs if you integrate IPNs (whereas with REST you would integrate webhooks... the differences keep coming!).
I've seen different documentation on various forums and site on different ways of using Paypal api, here is a pretty useful link: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ECOnMobileDevices&bn_r=o/, My question is a little different i do not want to use any of the Paypal libraries offered to us in my app, this is the link to libraries:https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/sdk , I also do not want to gather any personal information, I want Paypal to take care of everything. So in other words I want to be able to open up a UIWebview to the Paypal's mobile site if possible (or if not the regular site will work) have to user log in with his credential or he can use the express checkout option and get back the transaction ID, or receipt what ever is available. I'm a little new to iOS and any help is appreciated.
If you don't want to use any libraries or API's, Express Checkout won't work for you.
Which does make it somewhat easier, as you can just use PayPal Website Payments Standard in a UIWebView instead.
For example; just open https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=your#email.tld&amount=1.99¤cy_code=GBP
This will start a 1.99 GBP payment to email#here.tld via PayPal, and automatically use a mobile layout.
If you subsequently want to receive transaction information; set up PayPal IPN on your account and use that to receive transaction-related events. This can be handled outside your app, and thus take away precious processing power to the server.
For an overview on getting started with PayPal IPN, have a look at https://www.paypal.com/ipn/
I would strongly suggest against trying to do transactions through paypal. If you look at the App Store Review Guidelines it states that
11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected
I'm trying to create a simple personal project: I want to give myself bounties for completing tasks that often fester on my todo list. If I complete a task, for example, $5 should automatically move out of my savings account into a discretionary spending debit card.
Are there any APIs or banks that have those APIs that could let me do that? All of the paypal APIs seem to charge a fee, which would be kind of silly if the money is simply moving between accounts. Any suggestions?
Most banks/organisations will charge I suspect as a vast amount of money made by these organisations is from transfer charges. I cannot think of free api that would let you do it.
However you could consider using another commercial organisation, say like Amazon, and perhaps use it's APIs to supply purchase with gift cards automatically? I'm not saying Amazon is free, I'm just using it as an example.
It's not quite what you want but may be acceptable.
it may not be pretty, but you can use curl to do transactions over https, provided your online bank uses standard html forms in some way, but it typicaly takes 3 processes
1. Login to get a token (user name and password will be required)
2. Use token to get a cookie (in some cases 1 and 2 are reversed)
3. use curl to post the form data for your transaction
There are some good pointers on using curl in similar ways here:
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html
I've written a subscription based web app that I want to charge (by credit card) a monthly fee. There are 3 different plans and once they sign up, they should be billed that amount, automatically, every month until they cancel. Is there an easy way to set this up (some sort of online service maybe?).
You can use Paypal's merchant service to provide reoccurring charges for a subscription.
Pretty easy to implement, they provide plenty of examples and even a sandbox to get you up and running.
There are now some service providers that take care of your billing and subscription needs. You use their API and they handle billing and subscriptions for you. Their services work with payment systems like PayPal and Authorize.Net.
Take a look at the following sites:
Chargify
Spreedly
Cheddargetter
I would suggest not using Paypal or Authorize's recurring payments directly. Their APIs are brutal, and the functionality is very rudimentary. It may work fine for when you're just starting out, but if you ever want to change anything down the line, you'll be in trouble.
I work for CheddarGetter, so I'm biased, but you should check us out.
Our competitors are not as robust or flexible, but they are definitely better than using Paypal or Authorize.net directly.