• FormSmarts only notifies you of a new order form submission after the payment is confirmed and verified.
• Your customer receives an automated order confirmation email.

What Are the Benefits of Advanced PayPal Integration?

FormSmarts standard PayPal integration is easy to use and set up as it requires no change to your PayPal account. A downside to this is that FormSmarts has no way to know if the payment went through or not, and you — the seller — needs to manually reconcile payments and order forms using the FormSmarts Reference Number. That’s usually not an issue for small sales volumes, but can quickly become so as sales increase. At this stage payment processing must be fully automated and integrated with the form processing platform. That’s exactly what FormSmarts Advanced PayPal Integration is doing. Here are the benefits:

• The seller is only notified of an order when the payment has gone through.
• The transaction won’t appear in stored form data until the customer has paid.
• No need to reconcile the order forms received with payment notifications from PayPal.
• FormSmarts verifies that the payment details match those of the order.
• FormSmarts sends an order 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 order forms are on autopilot — at least for the ordering part.

Setting Up Advanced PayPal Integration

To set up advanced PayPal integration, first create an order form with prices formatted in the same way as you would do with FormSmarts standard PayPal integration. Then visit the Forms tab of the form builder and select Integrate with PayPal using advanced integration in the Form Details screen, as illustrated below.

It’s now time to log on to your PayPal account to add your Secret PayPal URL. PayPal will use that URL to communicate with FormSmarts. You’ll find your personal URL in the Security Settings section of your FormSmarts account. Note that the URL contains your private security key and it should therefore be kept confidential.

In your PayPal Profile, go to Selling Preferences, Instant Payment Notification Preferences and paste your URL there. Make sure IPN message delivery is enabled before saving.

Notes

Advanced PayPal Integration comes with all Business-level plans and doesn’t work with recurring payments/PayPal subscriptions or donations at this time.

Creating a Subscription Form

Creating a subscription form is quick and easy:

1. If you haven’t got a FormSmarts account yet, sign up for a FormSmarts Pro or Business account, then create a form with the form generator
2. In the Form Details screen of the form generator, set the On Submission option to Show Confirmation & Integrate with PayPal
3. Add radio buttons, a drop-down list or a checkbox, and enter the description, price and duration of subscription options formatted as My Subscription ($19.99 USD/month), as shown on the screenshot above and in this demo.

Duration of a Subscription

The time before another payment is due can be specified in days, weeks, months, or years. The form builder understands the following formatting variations:

• Monthly Subscription ($9.99 USD/Month)
• 30-Day Subscription ($9.99 USD/30 days)

Trial Subscription

Like in the example presented in the first section, you may specify a trial period for the subscription. This is typically used to give a free trial subscription to the buyer before he is charged for the first billing cycle. The buyer will not have to pay anything if he cancels the subscription before the end of the trial period.

• The trial period doesn’t need to be free
• You may specify up to two trial periods
• Any trial periods must be placed on the form after the main subscription specification.

Any Feedback?

As always, your feedback is important to us and is our primary source of inspiration for developing new features. You can also post your questions and comments on Facebook and Twitter (@FormSmarts).

• Redirect users to the Return URL of the form
• Show a detailed confirmation page with print, PDF and email features.

Redirection

Select the redirect option in the Form Details screen of the form builder to automatically redirect users to the Return URL of the form instead of showing them the confirmation page. Redirects have been supported for a while, but could not be set up via the form builder.

This feature allows you, for example, to redirect users to a download URL of your site after they’ve entered their information.

Note: Do not choose this option if your form includes a payment, as users would be redirected instead of being led the page where they are asked to make the payment.

Detailed Form Confirmation Page

The detailed confirmation page shows a summary of the data submitted and allows form users to:

• Print a copy of the data submitted
• Download a web receipt in PDF format with the same information
• Have a copy of the form data emailed to them.

Use the detailed confirmation page whenever you want users to be able to keep a copy/proof of the data they’ve submitted. Feel free to try this demo. This feature is only available with Business accounts.

• Chargeable items may now be placed in check boxes. This should prove valuable in situations where you’re building a form with one or several optional, individually priced items.
• Payment button instead of link. We’ve replaced the payment link on the confirmation page by a more outstanding button.
• Form ID now shown in PayPal report. Up to now, when you needed to reconcile a payment with the corresponding form submission, you could only rely on the FormSmarts Reference Number. This is the unique ID shown in the subject of emails containing form data and in Form to Excel reports. The same ID appears in the payment details in your Paypal account, and also in the CSV report you can generate. We’ve now added the Form ID (see screenshot) to the information available on PayPal, so you may quickly identify which form each payment is for.

We warmly welcome your feedback.

For example, you can easily build:

• an event registration form (registration form demo)
• a booking form (booking form demo)
• an online order form (order form demo)
• a subscription form for recurring payments (PayPal subscription demo)
• a PayPal donation form (donation form demo)
• and any other web forms which you want to integrate with PayPal

Tip: The demos above are hosted on FormSmarts, but you can also embed a form on your own website with the code snippet given by the form builder.

Do you need help making a PayPal form?
Ask a PayPal Integration Specialist Now

Requesting a Payment on a Form

To requesting a payment on a form:

1. If you haven’t got one, create a PayPal account. You’ll need a Premier or Business account to be able to receive credit card payments.
2. Sign up for a FormSmarts Pro or Business account and create a form with the form builder
3. In the Form Details screen, set the On Submission option to Show Confirmation & Integrate with PayPal
4. Add radio buttons, a drop-down list or a checkbox, and enter the description and price of products formatted as My Product Description ($30 USD), as shown on the screenshot below.

That’s all you need to do. We’ll pick up the products and quantities that were selected, and we’ll redirect the user to a pre-filled page on Paypal for payment.

Billing Multiple Items on a Form

You can as easily charge for several items within a single form submission by adding other drop-down lists or radio buttons formatted as just described.

Adding a Product Quantity Box

If you’re building an order form, you will need to allow the user to enter the quantity or number of products they want to buy.

This can be done as follows:

1. Position the quantity field immediately after the one listing products for sale
2. Set the field type to Positive Integer.

Creating a Subscription Form with Recurring Payments

A subscription involves a recurring payment at each billing cycle until the subscription is canceled. This article discusses how to create a subscription form. Recurring payments can also be used to allow the buyer to pay in installments. A payment by installments is a recurring payment where the number of payments is fixed. The syntax is Payment in 12 Installments (12x$9.99 USD/month). See this sample form.

Building a Donation Form

FormSmarts Payment Integration also supports PayPal Donations. To create a donation form:

• In the Form Details screen of the form builder, set the On Submission option to Show Confirmation & Integrate with PayPal
• Add a field to your form with the field name formatted as My Donation ($ USD)
• Set the field’s data type to Number
• Set the field’s widget to Text Box.

Handling International Payments

To request a payment in a currency other than US dollars, simply change the currency code in the item’s description. For example, use (€60 EUR) to receive a payment in Euros, (£60 GBP) for a payment in Sterlings, and ($60 CAD) to request a payment in Canadian dollars. Note that the 3-letter currency code is required because a currency symbol may be used by more than one currency. For example, USD, CAD, and AUD will all use the dollar sign ($).

The text of the button inviting the user to proceed to payment is displayed in his preferred language, in any of the supported languages.

Reconciling Form Responses & Payment Data

With Advanced PayPal Integration, the order form is only sent to the seller after the payment went through. However with the Standard PayPal Integration that comes with FormSmarts Pro, the seller has to manually reconcile order forms and payments.

If the name and email address submitted as part of form data don’t match those in the Paypal account that was used to send the payment, you will need to reconcile each form submission with the corresponding payment using the FormSmarts reference number.

The FormSmarts reference number is the 25-character ID that is given to users on the confirmation page, and is shown in the subject of the email notification we send you. The same reference number will appear in the payment details in your Paypal account (Transaction Details screen, under the Custom heading).

How Payment Integration Works

In the current implementation, your Paypal email address must be the same as your FormSmarts login. You can change your FormSmarts login if needed.

To avoid the user having to type the same information twice if paying by credit card, we will attempt to pass on his first name, last name, email and country to Paypal. If you intend to request this information on your form, make sure you name the first name and last name fields exactly like this.

The PayPal form / PayPal integration feature is only available to FormSmarts Pro and FormSmarts Business members.

Redirecting Users to Your Site After Payment

To redirect users to you website after they have completed payment, visit the Form Details screen of the form builder and set the Return URL of the form to you site’s URL.

We welcome your feedback about payment integration.

We also use return URLs to compute the list of websites in Settings > Websites.

If you don’t have a web page, simply use “http://formsmarts.com” as the return URL.

Return URL & Form Ownership

To prevent abuse, the link to the return URL is only displayed on the confirmation page if the form owner is verified or is a FormSmarts Pro or FormSmarts Business user. Visit the Settings tab of your account to verify your sites.

Redirecting Visitors to a Page of Your Site

You can set up a form to skip the Confirmation page and automatically redirect the visitor to the form’s Return URL. Note that the visitor will then not get the FormSmarts Reference Number of the transaction. Redirection can be activated in the Form Details screen of the form builder, under On Submission. FormSmarts Pro and Business customers only.

PayPal Landing Page for Forms Including a Payment

If you use our PayPal form feature to add a payment to your form, the Return URL will be used as the PayPal landing page. Users will be redirected to that page by PayPal after the payment has been completed.