Donations via PayPal on WebForms Website

Question

HI,

I'm developing a donations functionality to an existing ASP.Net Webforms Website for a non-profit organization that requires the ability to ask for donations from their users.

There are multiple types of donations, some have a minimum value, others are open, and others fixed values, but the main aspect is that these values, and their behaviours described before, must be dynamic, since the organization has the ability to change these values on the database that supports the website.

I can't seem to find a way to use the "Donate" buttons in the way i just described, since they either have a fixed value, set up on the moment of their creation on the PayPal website, and this can't seem to be editable on the button code, or they start with an empty value that the user can fiddle as they please.

I've used the Express Checkout process in the past, but for product payments, and am wondering if i can process the donations via this flow, but cannot find any documentation on the matter across the web.

I know this is more of a PayPal question than an ASP one, but i've posted the same question on PayPal's community help forum some days ago, and so far i haven't got a single answer, so i was wondering if any of you guys could point me in the right direction please?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Questions related to the use of a third party product is going to have to go through their support. This forum just focuses on MS products so we aren't going to be much help.

The most I can say, having used PayPal for many years, is that everything you are asking to do can be done by PP easily. All you need to do is hook your buttons up to a controller action. In the controller action create a transaction on the PP side for the correct amount, this is what PP uses anyway. You'll get a token back that you use to redirect to PP such that it can pull the correct information. This is really no different than what you're probably doing now.

However, as I already mentioned, PP will need to provide support for the specific details of getting this to work. But it shouldn't be any different than what you're doing now. The amount is a configurable option set when you create the transaction. Where that value comes from is irrelevant.

Answer 2

Create several Donate buttons on PayPal with the various options you might use. Look at the code for the various options. Write your own code to read the options your clients want from the database and create the correct PayPal code for the button those options need, and output that script as part of the page.