recently at work i was given the task of integrating our shopping cart with paypal’s payment api so that customers could pay with their paypal accounts, as well as by bank transfer or credit card (although the latter seems rather pointless since we already have a verisign implementation). having already completed integration of verisign and hsbc credit card payment modules, i was prepared for a testing environment that was shaky at best. what i found was entirely to the contrary… paypal developer central. once you create your developer central account, you have access to the paypal sandbox server, which is essentially a robust, testing mirror of the actual paypal site. i was able to create a handful of various paypal accounts: business, personal, merchant, etc… and i was able to fill them up with fake money, credit cards and bank info. that way when i do my testing, i can test the real paypal payment flow, with all this fake data. it is even smart enough to save all the email messages that would be sent out in a “real” implementation into your developer account email center box. i must say, this is pretty slick. and all that you need to do to go live is change the host that you are posting your data to, and voila, perfect paypal payment paradise! after the other integrations i’ve done, this one was a piece of cake because the test mode actually tests the real stuff! you’d think the other big players would take a hint from paypal on this one… direct payments are where you make money, but how can you know your payment interaction is tight unless you fully test the program flow before you start taking live data?
