Product Description

Pro PayPal E-Commerce contains the most comprehensive collection of information on the latest PayPal technologies available. It takes the approach of PayPal as a digital money platform, and shows how its a dynamic service that offers far more than just payment processing.

With its breadth of technologies and APIs, the PayPal platform is a basis for development and innovation for an unlimited number of possibilities. It offers a wide range of payment technologies, but its not always easy to decipher which technology is the best choice for a web site. This book gets under the hood to show you how the different technologies work, how to choose the right solution, and how to implement the solutioncomplete with real-world PayPal success stories.

Youll learn how to integrate PayPal directly into web sites to make use of its payment technologies. This allows you, no matter what language you program in, to build shopping carts or similar channel products with PayPal as a payment option. You can also use this book to learn about the basics of e-commerce, where PayPal fits in, and how you can meet your own e-commerce needs. This book covers

• How PayPal works
• Using the PayPal API
• Website Payments Standard
• Website Payments Pro
• Instant Payment Notification
• Payment Data Transfer
• Encrypted Website Payments
• Administration
• Reporting
• Fraud protection
• Payflow Gateway

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232467 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-05
• Released on: 2008-05-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 279 pages

About the Author
Damon Williams has worked at PayPal since 2004, where he has
specialized in making life easier for people trying to integrate PayPal
into web sites and applications. His background is in software
engineering, community building, and content publishing. He is a
certified Java developer with over seven years of experience, and he
also spent five years as the publisher of Feedback Magazine in Austin,
Texas. His current position is managing the PayPal Developer Network,
where he is building an online community for innovation and support on
the PayPal commerce platform.

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive treatment
For all of PayPal's enormous growth in recent months, you would think that good documentation for developers would be plentiful. But this has not, in fact, been the case. Precisely because PayPal offers such a large number of different solutions for payments, reporting and fraud prevention, developers and online merchants have not always been able to easily select optimal solutions for their needs.

That should now be a thing of the past with the publication of Williams's "Pro PayPal E-Commerce". The book covers all PayPal payments options currently available, starting with the PayPal account and moving through basic and encrypted website payments, postpayment processsing, and the PayPal API. Instant Payment Notification (IPN) and Payment Data Transfer (PDT) are covered in detail. Payflow Pro and Payflow Link, formerly of the VeriSign family of payment services (acquired by PayPal in 2005), form the basis of chapter seven.

The book focuses on developers throughout with, for example, code samples covering both SOAP and Name-Value Pair (NVP) access to the PayPal API. The nine chapters organize by solution type, concluding with transaction variables, payment variables, currency variables and error codes in the appendix.

"Pro PayPal E-Commerce" provides the best explanation of all PayPal services currently available. And because PayPal integration has always been more about picking the right solution for your buyers and your business than about numbers of lines of code, Williams's book comes at the perfect time for a large and growing community of online merchants and developers. The experience of our engineers here at Jaduka lead me recommend the book strongly.

Trevor Baca
VP Software Engineering at Jaduka

PayPal E-commerce in a consolidated, easy-to-follow format.
It's refreshing to see a book from the source. Damon has taken the collective knowledge of his day-to-day role and delivered a book that answers all of your questions about building a professional e-commerce solution with PayPal.

The book starts with an overview of the PayPal Payment options and helps the reader narrow down which solution is right for them. Then, each solution is clearly defined with code examples and screen captures to help guide you through the process.

Having worked with hundreds of small businesses, I can see how this book would be highly effective in the hands of small business owners. They will not only be able to determine which solution is right for them, but will also learn what is involved in building that solution and better understand what their future upgrade path may look like.

Everything you want to know about building an e-commerce solution with PayPal is in this book and I highly recommend it to developers as well as small business owners, corporate executives, and department managers who are looking for an overall understanding of the PayPal transaction processing solutions. The bottom line with books like this is effectiveness; and in Pro PayPal E-Commerce Damon has done an excellent job of clearly illustrating the management and development paths required to build and deploy practical and cost effective e-commerce projects.

Good until you get to Paypal API
The book did a good job of covering everything EXCEPT the Paypal API. It had a smattering of samples in PHP, Java, C#, VB, and Perl up until that point.

Once the PayPal API is discussed, there are only a couple of samples and everything in Java despite the growing (and perhaps exceeding) popularity of PHP for website development. While not entirely the author's fault given the poor shape of PayPal PHP SDK, it was disappointing that so little time and explaination was given on how to use Paypal's API. If you're looking for help integrating PHP with the Paypal API for Website Payments Pro or Express Payment, you're out of luck. This book won't help.

This is unfortunate since the Paypal API is the most complex part of integration and perhaps the reason you would buy a book like this since many of the other integrations such as IPN are fairly easy by comparison.

The book does do a good job of working you through IPN integration, so if that's what you need, then this book will help.

Having had to now try and learn the PayPal API on my own, it does seem like it's fundamentally 'over-complex' and Paypals SDKs do little to hide the complexity. Perhaps the Java SDK is in better shape, but the PHP one is a bear to get configured and working correctly