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Hi,
I am once again confused!!

Max wrote on the 10th October 2012 a FAQ on how to use the “PayPal Redirect”

All his actions refer to Trial Actions:

“PayPal Redirect – Trial (0) and PayPal Listener – Trial (1)”

However, the very last sentence of this FAQ states: “It should work fine now, but you should purchase the "PayPal plugin" from our subscriptions page in order to be able to use it for live transactions.”

This is the confusing thing!!!

The PayPal plug at $30 states that: “The user must have a Paypal WebPayments Pro API enabled account!

Can you see perhaps why I and many others are confused?

We do not mind purchasing product for good work but to be cornered into using PayPal Pro accounts at £20 per month with a 1.4% - 3.4% + 20p per transaction for a small, perhaps newly started website is ridiculous!!

Can someone please explain all this and perhaps just state simply:

1. Will the plug offered on the Subscriptions Tab “PayPal Plug” at $30 work with a PayPal standard business account or not?

2. If not can someone write a simple tutorial on how to achieve PayPal payments.

I am sure that within the numerous posts on this forum that there lies simple answers to both questions, but most people do not have the time to endlessly search.

I again stress that this is a great product but for non programmers it falls short with its how to documentation. I even bought the book, V3 to use on V4, but still get lost!!

Hi hopemanjohn,

You'll need to ask Max about his PayPal plug-ins, use the Contact Us link above.

In my experience you can use PayPal perfectly adequately using the ReDirect URL and ReDirect User actions (both built in and free) for most simple purposes. These will allow you to send the user to PayPal to approve a payment and you will get the usual PayPal email confirmation of the sale.

You exceptions that I know of are (a) when you need or want to keep the user on your site rather than redirecting them to PayPal and (b) when you need instant confirmation of the payment on the site - because, for example, you are selling downloadable goods and don't want to risk bad payments.

In both these cases you need to have one of the more advanced PayPal set ups that used behind the scenes hand-shaking to confirm the transaction details and it's success/failure. I'm not fully up to date but these include IPN, Express Checkout and the APIs.

You certainly don't need a PayPal account that requires extra payment to use IPN because I use it and don't pay.

You do need to pay for PayPal Payments Pro but that is aimed at on-line shops.

It looks to me as though Express Checkout is also aimed at on-line stores to sit alongside existing Credit Card payment options.

The simplest solution is to setup a hosted button on PayPal and either include that directly in your form (it probably needs to be in the Thank You page), or to better to extract the input date from it and set it up in a ReDirect URL (see this thread for example).

Bob