Can I send a variable to paypal, and have it post it back to me when payment completes?

Question

Ive been using express checkout API to convert people\'s accounts on my site to premium accounts after paying. The only problem with it is that it doesn\'t send the user bac

Answer 1

According to HTML Variables for PayPal Payments Standard you can send all the "Pass-through" variables:

item_number Pass-through variable for you to track product or service purchased or the contribution made. The value you specify is passed back to you upon payment completion. This variable is required if you want PayPal to track inventory or track profit and loss for the item the button sells.

custom Pass-through variable for your own tracking purposes, which buyers do not see. Default – No variable is passed back to you.

and

invoice Pass-through variable you can use to identify your invoice number for this purchase. Default – No variable is passed back to you.

All these pass-through variables are sent back by the IPN in the payment response info.

You just have to render your HTML template server-side and write the fields back in the HTML code like

Technically the field "custom" can be a JSON encoded string if you want to handle more data like

myItemObject = {
   "customerEmail" : "john@doe.com
   "customerID: "AAFF324"
}
jsonInfo = json.dumps( myItemObject )
return render_template(tmpl_name, jsonInfo=jsonInfo, productID=productID, invoiceID=invoiceID)