eBay DevCon 08 - Wed18 11:30 PayPal Integration Strategies

This speak was given by Chad Hofman (Technical Integration Manager, PayPal) and Kurt Kellberg (Intgration Engineer, PayPal).

API interfaces can be used by SOAP and NVP. It is recommended to use SOAP only if you really know SOAP. NVP is simple to use and can get you up and going easily.

API Certificate Credentials are mandatory for large merchants and are a little bit safer than Signature Credentials. Handling timeouts is something that must be done by the developer integrating, though many APIs respond in less than one second and 95% of all API Responses under five seconds. APIs that move money takes longer.

Logging is obviously a good idea for all developers and is recommended that at minimum onde should log the CorrelationID from the API Response and ideally to log the entire API Request and Response (make sure to strip out the sensitive data).

Know the difference between ECS (Express Checkout Shortcut - it is a clickable button and must redirect to PayPal) and ECM (Express Checkout Mark - just a graphic, use with radio buttons or a drop-down menu). All graphics should be hosted at PayPal.

The presentation showed on which flows and pages from the Express Checkout the developer integrating with PayPal may interfere with the look and information being displayed.

This presentation is much more useful if you download and read it. It is full of integration examples and pitfalls. Very useful to the developers.