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What support does PayPal offer platforms?
What is the cost of PayPal platform solutions?
Are e-commerce website builders the same as e-commerce platforms?
Paypal has a sandbox environment for development and testing purposes. Sign up here - https://developer.paypal.com. It works exactly like live PayPal and very easy to use.
What type of PayPal account are you going to use? If the Standard one then you won't be able to use any advanced API and will be provided only with a form with hidden elements like "amount" or "email". This form you put on your site and clients will be redirected to PayPal to make payments. If you want to get a notification from PayPal with transaction details you have to enable IPN posts. This can be done in the PayPal account settings. IPN post will execute your script at the URL you should specify.
Let me know if you need any examples.
I am not sure how to automatically bill the client. Please check with API - https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/library_documentation.
Looking at your tags, you mention PHP. OSCommerce would be a good place to start for you as you could then see a Administration Site, Front end facing customer site. Then you have the code, the documentation, payment gateway integrations etc...
From here you could use as a template for a more custom and smaller system, or use OSCommerce and create extra modules for it.
Andrew
http://www.oscommerce.com/
As a recent graduate of a web dev bootcamp, I’ve found it pretty hard to come up with projects I’m interested in and passionate about. But me and my gf went to a Lego convention recently and after talking to a couple vendors I met there and through some discord servers, I’ve been really wanting to learn how to create a website that can safely and easily handle transactions.
I’ve done a good bit of research the past few days and the PayPal api looks great but after reading how much Wordpress is used and just how many websites use it I’m thinking that might be the better option. Especially considering you can add your own bits of code.
I’m curious to what everyone here recommends. Pros, cons, and anything else that would help make this decision.
Edit: should’ve mentioned with Wordpress using plugins to be able to have transactions on the website as well.