Taking payment on a website

Whats the recommended way to do this with Paypal (i've heard they're a nightmare to deal with).

Ideally the user would sign up with credit card details and then i'd process the payments through their banks? Is that how开发者_如何学JAVA it works? With API's?

Ideally the user would sign up with credit card details and then i'd process the payments through their banks? Is that how it works?

No. In a correctly designed system you never have access to your user's credit card number. It's your payment processor (eg PayPal, MoneyBookers, FastSpring, etc.) that takes care of processing your customer's credit card.

So your customer is taken to the payment processor's site (on a page which can be customized to use your company's logo etc.) and then your payment processor warns you when a purchase a made (for example by calling a specific URL).

With API's?

Yup, PayPal (and MoneyBookers and things like FastSpring) offer APIs for several languages (like Java APIs).

PayPal has a dev environment on which you can test these kind of functionalities, so does MoneyBookers if I recall correctly (also note that sometimes the dev environments are a bit buggy and/or down).

PayPal offers APIs for processing payments. Typically, the user is taken off your page to login into paypal and then paypal calls back to your site with approval/shipping info. The whole point is for the user to shield their credit card info from your site, making things safer.* You can use either the NVP (name-value pair) or SOAP protocol for development. There are also 3rd party libraries to simplify integration.

Check out the API reference here to get an idea:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_api_reference

*PayPal does offer a Direct Payment API which allows your site to take credit cards directly and use PayPal as the gateway:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_dcc_hub-outside