PayPal Integration in Two Steps
FormSmarts PayPal integration is as easy to use as our popular PayPal form feature, but it provides several additional benefits, mainly:
- FormSmarts only notifies you of a new registration (or more generally, payment form submission) after the payment is confirmed and verified (no need for manual verification)
- Your customer receives an automated email receipt with a copy of the data submitted and a payment confirmation. For registration forms, this can work as an e-ticket.
- PayPal Integration works seamlessly with other FormSmarts features (export to Excel, PDF reports, API).
What Are the Benefits of PayPal Integration?
FormSmarts’ old PayPal integration was easy to use and set up as it required no change to your PayPal account. A downside to this was that FormSmarts had no way to know if the payment went through or not, and you — the seller — had to manually reconcile payments and the corresponding form responses using the FormSmarts Reference Number. That was usually not an issue for small sales volumes, but could quickly become so as sales increased. We’ve now fully automated payment processing and integrated it with the form processing platform. Here are the benefits:
- No need to manually reconcile form responses with payment notifications from PayPal
- The seller is only notified of a registration/order when the payment has gone through
- The transaction won’t appear in Excel exports until the buyer has paid
- FormSmarts verifies that the payment details match data submitted on the form (e.g. amounts, quantities)
- Excel exports combine data submitted through the form and details of the corresponding payments.
- FormSmarts sends a confirmation email to the buyer with both the order details and a payment confirmation. If you have verified your website and uploaded a logo, your site URL and logo will appear in the email.
- Payment processing is fully automated and if you’re using online/PDF reporting or export to Excel, your registration forms are on autopilot.
- You can further automate processing or integrate FormSmarts with your website or another web service using the FormSmarts API.
Setting Up PayPal Integration
This video shows how to set up your form and set up your PayPal account for PayPal Integration.
Add Fees to the Form & Set It Up to Integrate with PayPal
To set up PayPal integration, first create a payment form with prices formatted as shown in the PayPal integration page of the site. Then visit the Forms tab of the form builder and select Integrate with PayPal in the Submit Actions tab of the Form Details screen, as illustrated below.
Add Your FormSmarts Notification URL to PayPal
It’s now time to log in to your PayPal account to add your Notification URL. PayPal will use this URL to communicate with FormSmarts. You’ll find your notification URL in the Security Settings section of your FormSmarts account. The URL contains your private security key, so don’t share it with anyone.
Use this link to access the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) page of your PayPal account, then tap Edit Settings and paste your Notification URL in the box as shown on the screenshot below. Make sure Receive IPN messages is enabled before saving.
You can alternatively navigate to the IPN Settings screen from the homepage of your PayPal account.
Payment integration will not work until you have added your FormSmarts Notification URL to your PayPal account.
Did You Link Multiple Emails to PayPal?
If you’ve associated more than one email address to your PayPal account, the email you’ve selected as your Primary PayPal email must be the same as your FormSmarts login email.
You can either change your FormSmarts login or update your Primary PayPal email so both email addresses are the same.
FormSmarts will reject payments associated with an email address other than your FormSmarts login email for security reasons.
If PayPal shows an error on the checkout page when testing your first form, you may need to update your PayPal account settings.
Posted by FormSmarts on
Apr 28, 2011 at 1:12 pm in payment form.
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Tags: form builder, payment integration, paypal, paypal form
27 Responses to “PayPal Integration in Two Steps”
I assume you’re going to be getting info such as name, address, etc. for your first delegate. Is there a way to get this info for the second delegate as well but only if there is one? For example, a button for “add another delegate” linking to more or less a duplicate form that will retain billing info and add to it?
To add the details of another delegate you have two options. The first one is to simplest: just add another set of fields, and make each one optional. If you want to accommodate for possibly more than two delegates, you would need to use form chaining which would work in the way you’re describing. To do this on FormSmarts you would need to set the Return URL of the form to the URL of the form itself and set the On Submission option in the Form Details Screen to “Integrate with PayPal using SuperCart”. With SuperCart, the buyer will be able to chose on the Confirmation page whether to add another delegate or proceed to PayPal for payment, where (s)he will be able to pay for all priced items for all transactions at once. You can try out a SuperCart demo to see how it works. SuperCart is part of FormSmarts Advanced PayPal Integration described on this page.
Thanks so much, form chaining looks like almost exactly what I was looking for! One more question, though – when I fill out my first delegate name, company, company address, then continue shopping, is there any way to return to the form with the company name and address used for first delegate pre-filled for second delegate?
Not at this time but this could certainly be added in the future.
Okay, I’m trying to get this form chaining to work. My page to enter data is http://example.org/zzzz. I have it set to integrate with paypal using supercart. My return URL is the same as the original, http://example.org/zzzz. But when I am testing it and hit continue shopping, it takes me to http://example.org/zzzz?shop=Continue+Shopping which is not set up. Did I miss something? Do I have to set up another page for this?
Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated!
Nona, http://example.org/zzzz and http://example.org/zzzz?shop=Continue+Shopping should actually lead to the same page on your site, i.e. your shop’s homepage.
Is it possible to have prefilled fields in my form? I would like to send some data (lets say “product ($50 USD)” ) to paypal without asking the user to select any specific option in the form.
When the user gets the from the product he/she would be buying is already defined, what they would select in the form is just the shipping method with associated cost and delivery details.
Veronica,
Add a drop-down list with a single option “product ($50 USD)” and make sure the field is Optional. The pricing option will then be automatically selected and users won’t be able to deselect it.
Posted by: admin | Mar 13th, 2012 at 7:35 am Is it possible to create an option where the user inputs the dollar amount and add a field where a percentage of the dollar amount is automatically added, ie:
Enter Payment: $1000.00 <– customer input
5% Convenience Fee or Tax: $50.00 <– automatically added
Total Payment: $1050.00
No, this is not possible at this time. We’re working on a feature which will allow this in the coming months.
Is is possible for the user to have a choice of quantity eg. they are booking a class for which we have set the price per person (integrated with paypal) and they want to pay for 2 people at the same time
Hi Jo. Yes, simply add a Quantity Box, see Adding a Product Quantity Box section on the payment integration help page. You could also have a more complex setup using SuperCart as explained here.
last year, you were asked by Nona if there was a way to prefill form information when a person uses the PayPal Supercart option and hits continue shopping. At that time, there was not that option. Has it been added? We are using the form to register people for a 5K run and many times a person will register their entire family, so the address, phone number and email address are often the same.
I intent to integrate paypal at some point and want to know what info I receive from paypal. Eventually I will expand the form to include name, postcode, email, tel, EDD, class date, paratiy and age. If I get contact details from paypal I wont ask for them on the form (aside from name).
Lis, you won’t necessarily get contact details from PayPal. I recommend you ask for contact details on the form, making sure you format them as explained here so that FormSmarts recognizes the address and passes to PayPal. This will ensure you consistently get customer details without them to have to enter the same information twice. Note: this only applies to Advanced PayPal Integration (discussed on this page).
We are a small non profit, genealogical society. Each year we host a genealogy seminar. We want to use FormSmarts to pre register for the four sessions (some have a cost, others are free) with a drop down box that shows the available topics for each session and the price for each. After selecting the choice for each session, We want to add the price of each selection to a total, and if four paid sessions are selected, subtract a discount. Can Boolean logic be used (i.e. If total equals X apply a discount)?
Mike, you first need to add radio buttons with the discount like on this registration form. We will then write a script for you to implement the required logic.
We are using FormSmarts for a membership form but also using PayPal for our online store. We are now charging members shipping for this form submission, which I don’t want. But I cant set a $0.00 shipping amount because of my online store. Any ideas around this? I’d also like a recurring membership option?
Joe, we have a way to disable shipping and handling on our end. Please email us the FormSmarts.com URL of your membership form from the Help section of the site and we’ll set this up for you. Recurring memberships aren’t yet available with Advanced PayPal Integration but will be added in early 2016.
I replied to the comment notification email address, I hope that is the right one. The email on your support page is null java link.
Our form is a registration form with options to buy tickets and tshirts. I tried filling up the form then choosing to pay for a ticket. Once I confirmed the registration fields I typed, it gave me a confirmation that the form was sent without me going through the PAYPAL payment process. But nothing in my email inbox. It only works if I chose not to buy anything and just send the form.
Dennis, if you submit a registration form but don’t go through the payment process, you won’t get any notification. FormSmarts only notifies you of a new registration when the amount due has been paid.
We have created several forms, a form created in the past works with Paypal but another one created more recently does not. Do you know what the problem could be?
Thanks
SGGEE, the issue must be specific to that specific form. Please contact support at https://f8s.co/fs providing the FormSmarts.com URL of the form and describing what doesn’t work.
SGGEE, PayPal shows an error message “things don’t appear to be working at the moment…” because the currency code you specified on your form is invalid: it should be CAD, not CAN as entered on the form.
Is there a way to have payments from one form go to one paypal account and another form to a different paypal account?
GJB, some FormSmarts packages allow more than one PayPal accounts: up to 3 PayPal accounts may be associated with a Business Max account and up to 10 with the next plan up.
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