Integration Guide
Table Of Contents
- Preface
- How Website Payments Standard Works
- Using Your Merchant Account Profile and Tools
- The Account Profile Summary
- Branding PayPal’s Payment Pages
- Streamlining Purchases with Website Payment Preferences
- Blocking Certain Kinds of Payment
- Adding Your Credit Card Statement Name
- Getting Customer Contact Telephone Numbers
- Language Encoding Your Data
- Multi-User Access to Your PayPal Account
- PayPal-Supported Currencies
- Issuing Refunds
- Single-Item Payment: Buy Now and Donations
- Multiple-Item Payment: Shopping Cart
- Encrypted Website Payments
- Testing in the PayPal Sandbox
- Website Payments Standard HTML FORM Basics
- Website Payments Standard HTML Variables
- Country Codes
- Index
Website Payments Standard Checkout Integration Guide November 2005 91
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Website Payments Standard
HTML FORM Basics
This chapter describes the basic functionality of Website Payments Standard HTML FORMs in
technical terms.
Your customers interface with Website Payments Standard through hidden HTML FORM input
variables on your website. These FORMs submit variables and their values to PayPal. You set
these variables to produce the desired effect. Depending on the values of the variables, you can
invoke PayPal’s shopping cart, Buy Now, or Donations and activate or invoke various PayPal
features.
There is a wide variety of HTML creation tools for you to choose from. This guide does not
describe all the possibilities. PayPal offers “button factories” that walk you through the
process of creating HTML for Buy Now or Donations buttons and Shopping Cart buttons. For
more information about these button factories, see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.
FORM Attributes: ACTION and METHOD
The FORM tag includes two required attributes, ACTION and METHOD, and always looks like
this:
<FORM ACTION=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” METHOD=POST>
IMPORTANT:Do not change these values.These attributes are required for any PayPal
Shopping Cart, Buy Now, or Donations button.
Hidden Input Variables
HTML input variables in a PayPal Website Payments Standard FORM are always hidden from
the customer’s view. They have the following general format:
<INPUT TYPE=”hidden” name=”variableName” value=”allowedValue”>
The variableName is any of the variables described in Appendix A, “Website Payments
Standard HTML Variables,” and the
allowedValue is any of the values detailed for those
variables.