PayPal: Need a simple, stable alternative | Hacker News Reader

PayPal: Need a simple, stable alternative

4 pointsBlueHorseshoe5 comments

I'm in the process of creating an application (i.e.-classified ads) that requires users to submit payment (small amounts, no more than say $2) before their ad is live. Since this is my first experience dealing with online payments, I decided to go the PayPal route...only I've been unable to use their sandbox environment/accounts as it has been down for me for two weeks, and I got what from the reading I've done on HN is a typical response from PP's customer support, "At this time the engineers will only notify me now when the issue is being pushed to the sandbox site, unfortunately I do not know what the time frame is. It could be today, tomorrow, or a week."

Since a multi-billion dollar company can't tell me when things will be fixed, I need to look for another solution and am hoping you all have recommendations.

At this point, I simply need a "Pay Now" button that takes the user to a secure site to process their payment, upon completion it returns them back to my site. In this process, I need to be able to pass 2 variables to, thru and back to me (if successful) in order to "active" their submission (e.g.- PP's IPN).

Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated!

You should be able to use WePay for this. They offer a really good, simple service, with great customer support. You can use their API to set up a system exactly like you described. I am working on a project that uses the WePay API and it is great.

http://wepay.com

The sandbox is operational for me.

Have you tried Google Checkout? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1351330/paypal-like-ipn-w...

OP wanted something reliable. Google Checkout is absolutely not.

While it may be reliable technically, Google's tendency to phase out services should make you a little uncomfortable, but the biggest thing is they can and do terminate merchants without good reason and without ANY recourse. Twice, completely legitimate users (one a licensed church car raffle, one a simple donate-for-this-free-service) I was involved with were shut down without warning. They did not even specify a reason, and the downtime definitely hurt sales of raffle tickets.

Go with Authorize.net or a reseller. They are in this game for serious, not for fun.

I assume if he wanted to go the authorize.net route he would have already done so.

If the sandbox is your only problem with Paypal then stick with them. There aren't a lot of good alternatives out there.

If time is critical, why not just test on a real account? The payments are small and it sounds like you should be able to accomplish what you are looking for without a ton of testing. You will lose money in fees, but that might be a small price to pay compared to going with a much more expensive or generally a crappy alternative.

email me - I'm working on something that could work for this. fsimmons at gmail.

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