Integration Guide

Website Payments Standard HTML FORM Basics
Specifying the Website Payments Standard Product: cmd
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92 November 2005 Website Payments Standard Checkout Integration Guide
Specifying the Website Payments Standard Product: cmd
The cmd variable is always required in a FORM. Its value determines which Website Payments
Standard product you are using to obtain payment from the customer:
The input tag looks like one of the following:
z Buy Now or Donations: <INPUT TYPE=”hidden” name=”cmd” value=”_xclick”>
z Shopping Cart: <INPUT TYPE=”hidden” name=”cmd” value=”_cart”>
IMPORTANT:These INPUT tags are required exactly as shown above. Do not alter them.
Variations on Basic Variables
This section highlights some useful miscellaneous ideas about Website Payments Standard
FORM variables.
The HTML variables interact in various ways. Sometimes their effect is cumulative,
sometimes they can cancel each other out, sometimes a variable requires that you also set
another variable. These interactions are detailed in the descriptions of the variables in
Appendix A, “Website Payments Standard HTML Variables.”
Prompting for Quantity in Buy Now or Donations: undefined_quantity
With Buy Now and Donations, you can require the customer to specify the desired number of
copies of the single item by using the undefined_quantity variable:
<INPUT TYPE=”hidden” name=”undefined_quantity” value=”1”>
Recordkeeping with Passthrough Variables
Some variables are exclusively for your own use (such as for tracking orders) and are not
recorded or used by PayPal. The values you send to PayPal are returned to you in an Instant
Payment Notification (IPN) exactly as you set them. For this reason, they are called
passthrough variables.
The following are passthrough variables:
z custom
TABLE 7.1 Allowed Values for cmd Variable
Value of cmd Description
_xclick A Buy Now or Donations button
_cart A shopping cart