

PayPal: Need a simple, stable alternative - BlueHorseshoe

I'm in the process of creating an application (i.e.-classified ads) that requires users to submit payment (small amounts, no more than say $2) before their ad is live.  Since this is my first experience dealing with online payments, I decided to go the PayPal route...only I've been unable to use their sandbox environment/accounts as it has been down for me for two weeks, and I got what from the reading I've done on HN is a typical response from PP's customer support, "At this time the engineers will only notify me now when the issue is being pushed to the sandbox site, unfortunately I do not know what the time frame is. It could be today, tomorrow, or a week."<p>Since a multi-billion dollar company can't tell me when things will be fixed, I need to look for another solution and am hoping you all have recommendations.<p>At this point, I simply need a "Pay Now" button that takes the user to a secure site to process their payment, upon completion it returns them back to my site.  In this process, I need to be able to pass 2 variables to, thru and back to me (if successful) in order to "active" their submission (e.g.- PP's IPN).<p>Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated!
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LeBlanc
You should be able to use WePay for this. They offer a really good, simple
service, with great customer support. You can use their API to set up a system
exactly like you described. I am working on a project that uses the WePay API
and it is great.

<http://wepay.com>

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citricsquid
The sandbox is operational for me.

Have you tried Google Checkout?
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1351330/paypal-like-
ipn-w...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1351330/paypal-like-ipn-with-
google-checkout)

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alanh
OP wanted something reliable. Google Checkout is absolutely not.

While it may be reliable technically, Google's tendency to phase out services
should make you a little uncomfortable, but the biggest thing is they can and
do terminate merchants without good reason and without ANY recourse. Twice,
completely legitimate users (one a licensed church car raffle, one a simple
donate-for-this-free-service) I was involved with were shut down without
warning. They did not even specify a reason, and the downtime definitely hurt
sales of raffle tickets.

Go with Authorize.net or a reseller. They are in this game for serious, not
for fun.

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gexla
I assume if he wanted to go the authorize.net route he would have already done
so.

If the sandbox is your only problem with Paypal then stick with them. There
aren't a lot of good alternatives out there.

If time is critical, why not just test on a real account? The payments are
small and it sounds like you should be able to accomplish what you are looking
for without a ton of testing. You will lose money in fees, but that might be a
small price to pay compared to going with a much more expensive or generally a
crappy alternative.

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antidaily
email me - I'm working on something that could work for this. fsimmons at
gmail.

