I took on a “small” project which I shouldn’t have – it’s becoming more trouble than I anticipated, and the majority of it stems from integrating with paypal.  Their documentation for integrating with their services is (intentionally?) vague.  While there certainly is a huge amount of it, there are things which are just ignored, like setting up a sandbox account.  They do offer a complete “sandboxed” environment, with separate servers and all that, to ‘practice’ your development in.  However, you can’t use a ‘live’ account with the sandbox environment.  This triggers a ’10002′ error – ‘security headers are invalid’.  Overlooking the fact that in their documentation a 10002 error doesn’t actually have that text, but something else entirely, it doesn’t actually give you any clue as to how to fix the problem, or indeed what the cause of the problem is.  In my case, it was that I was using ‘live’ credentials against a sandbox URL.

Fair enough – changing the URL to the ‘live’ payment URL works, but I don’t want to be continually charging a card during testing.  After much digging and googling, I found a way to get to their sandbox developer center.  The process for setting up a sandbox account is *identical* to setting up a regular account, and that’s the problem.  You have to create an entire new company and company profile, username, password, email address, etc.  And the ‘click here to register’ emails are ‘sent’ but not to your email address.  “To avoid confusion” (their words) the emails are sent to their sandbox web-based email reader accessible through their sandboxed developer server.  Visiting the URL I was to ‘click’ to verify my account brought up half-empty pages that only had a link to ‘resubmit this form’ (or something like that).  The whole experience has been horrible.  But then again, they want to push your business to their paid ‘partner’ developers or to just use the paypal shopping cart in the first place.

The last piece is the kicker.  The sandbox service won’t give me the required sandbox API keys until my sandbox account is ‘verified’ – with real bank details.  This also means that I have to wait a few days for trial deposits to occur in my bank account.  All of this real-world processing is required to set up a TEST account?  Oh, and they couldn’t ‘verify’ another part of my account because my SSN didn’t verify with them!

PayPal – please make dealing with you easier.  I can never again in good conscience recommend paypal as an ecommerce solution to someone who wants to keep the client on their site for a consistent ‘look and feel’ experience.

• Previous Entry: Full text searching with SOLR
• Next Entry: PHP4 to 5 upgrades