As if I have too much time on my hands <g>. Ok, maybe i was feeling guilty for taking the day off and going sailing today...

Anyway, I spent some time over the last few days to cleanup some code I had originally written a while back for PayPal integration into the West Wind West Wind Web Store and decided to write this stuff up into an article. Although there's much information on this topic available already, when I was originally looking for it was hard to pull it together. A lot of the content also was focused on using PayPal's default order processing HTML interfaces which is not really a good fit for a West Wind Web Store. So this article goes at it from the 'as seamless as possible' angle which is a little different. I've also tried to get everything needed together in one article. You can find the article here:

http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/PayPalIntegration/PayPalIntegration.asp

The article is using ASP.NET/C# but the concepts should be easy to apply to any Web development environment.

I've actually been surprised how many orders I get in my store through PayPal. When I originally hooked this up a few months back I thought of it more of a novelty and another bullet item for the store software, but there are quite a few people left in this world who don't trust the Internet (or the vendors for that matter) with their credit cards. PayPal is nice in that respect in that they provide the ability to keep the credit card from any vendor at all - now you just have to worry that PayPal stays save and honest. <g>

On the merchant front too I've found a lot of people actually using the PayPal functionality as their main payment mechanism instead of merchant services. A lot of small operations or personal sites don't want to deal with merchant services it seems. I can't blame them - most merchant providers or at least the 'resellers' are crooks trying to make a quick buck of the unsuspecting vendor. Luckily that seems to be changing somewhat with better and more consistent gateway services appearing with reasonable prices (my experience with MerchantPlus and Authorize.Net has been a real joy actually). Anyway, PayPal seems to fit the bill for smaller or personal outfits where a merchant account may not make sense.