Integration Guide

PayPal Payments Standard Integration Guide June 2012 407
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HTML Form Basics for PayPal
Payments Standard
This chapter describes in technical terms the basic functionality of PayPal Payments Standard
and its use of HTML Forms. Use the information in this chapter as a guide to writing the
HTML code yourself for PayPal Payments Standard payment buttons. A wide variety of
HTML authoring tools exist. This guide does not describe all the possibilities.
People who pay you through PayPal Payments Standard interact with HTML forms and
hidden HTML input variables that you place on your website. When someone clicks a
payment button in an HTML form on a webpage, the form submits the variables and their
values to PayPal. You set the values of the variables to produce the desired effect, such as
invoking the Buy Now, the Donate, the Subscribe, or the PayPal Shopping Cart checkout
experience and various other PayPal features.
Form Attributes – ACTION and METHOD
The FORM tag includes two required attributes, action and method, which always look like
this:
<FORM action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
IMPORTANT: Do not change these values. These attributes are required for all payment
buttons and the Cart Upload command.
Hidden Input Variables
HTML input variables in a PayPal PayPal Payments Standard FORM are always hidden from
the payer’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, “HTML Variables for
PayPal Payments Standard,” and the
allowedValue is any of the values detailed for those
variables.