Posted: February 23, 2023 at 6:30 pm
|
Years ago (2016), we used the included PayPal credit card payment method and there were problems, e.g., about 2% of payments didn’t show up as paid in the reservations. That caused us to switch to the Braintree plugin in 2017 which has, so far as I know, never mis-handled a transaction. But Braintree is a nightmare for accounting, so I’m getting a lot of pressure to go back to PayPal. I see there is now a “PayPal Express Checkout Smart Payment Buttons (with Venmo)” and there is still or again a no-cost PayPal method included. Frankly I’m having trouble understanding the practical difference between one and the other, with the exception of one including Venmo and the other not. Both seems to be described as the most wonderful processing ever. Lot’s of words about “on-site” and “off-site” processing but I didn’t see any explanation of what those mean. On-site sounds bad to me, since I have a PCI certification and security posture that prohibits any credit card account number or info from ever being on my website. Our most common payment method is a credit card, so that’s my first priority. I know if I say to the treasurer “we have a no-extra-cost method or a maybe better one for $XX that would somehow be better” the response is likely to be “use the free one” so I need some better explanation(s) of what the real world, practical difference is. Thanks for any insights! |
|
|
Hi there, So first a quick explanation regarding ON-site and OFF-site payments. ON-site payment methods are those which collect card details ON your site and send them to your merchant to be processed. OFF-site payment methods are those which collect the details away from your site, on the merchants servers and then sends you back to your site to complete. This isn’t as clear cut as it used to be now that payment merchants use iframes to keep you on the site but you actually are still offsite. But the point is, offsite payments collect the card details on the payment merchant’s server and not yours.
I’m guessing this was using the ‘PayPal Standard’ integration and it highlights in part why we have multiple different PayPal payment method integrations. We found PayPal Standard to be far to unreliable at times, its an OFF-site payment method and works in the ‘old’ way, it was basically one of the first offsite payment methods out. The way it works is to send you to PayPal to make you payment, then POST you back to your site with some payment related details on that request and then ALSO send you an ‘IPN’ request to your server separately to actually confirm the payment was made. IPN’s turned out to be far to unreliable, we can’t rely solely on either the POST or the IPN, we have to us both and IPN’s would be delayed (minutes, hours, DAYS late) and it caused the above issue you mentioned. We deprecated PayPal Standard in favour of a PayPal Express integration, its still offsite but rather than using IPN’s it posts you back to the site and then allows you to send a request to PayPal’s server to confirm the payment… MUCH more reliable than standard. So…
PayPal Express was added to core to replace PayPal Standard, it’s a much more reliable integration method. PayPal Express Checkout with Smart Buttons was developed as an additional add-on later down the line, it’s yet another integration method (although still uses PayPal Express Checkout integration in the background) and adds additional features. So the different is indeed the additional features and including PayPal’s ‘smart buttons’ directly on the page (from PayPal themselves), if you don’t need those, you can use the built-in PayPal Express payment method without issue. SmartButtons are basically PayPal’s way of offering multiple different types of payment methods in a single step. Venmo, PayPal Credit, Card payment, PayPal Balance can all bt shown as a button for the user to click. Expres checkout offers some of those, but not all and its done in the modal rather than a button.
I assume you are using SAQ-A and want to start at that level? In which case you need an OFF-site payment method. |
|
|
Excellent, looks like just what I needed, thanks! I’ll have to check on the PCI level to be sure, I think you are correct in thinking we need off-site. |
|
|
Follow up question… You said “We deprecated PayPal Standard in favour of a PayPal Express” but I still see PayPal Standard available as a apparently available option in the Payment Methods Settings. What’s up with that? I also see PayPal Express there as an available option so I could just enable that and be up and running credit cards over on PayPal, no extra cost, right? |
|
With payment methods, we have a choice to make when deprecating them. We can remove them from the product and tell you we no longer support them you and need to switch payment methods… that’s a pretty bad experience for users. For example, let’s say you have ONLY PayPal Standard active and we removed it because it’s causing problems for others, yet you’ve never actually had an issue with it (some people don’t!) and now it’s gone. Lets say your developer setup that payment method for you and you don’t know how to do it yourself, you’ve got people on the phone asking why they can’t pay and you are stuck. The first instinct will be to contact us, likely frustrated, its already been a bad day before we have even been involved in helping get it fixed, again, it’s a bad experience all around 🙂 Or, we can deprecate them and hide them from new users, if you already have settings saved for PayPal standard in your install you ‘might’ be using it (you may not but again let’s give you the option) so we leave it available. If you are using and have never had issues you might even continue using it (some people still do even tho we have posted about it being deprecated and reached out to many of them). IF you then run into an issue with PayPal Standard and post on the forums, we state it’s been deprecated for a long time and advise switching to Express, there’s no crazy panic to get it fixed because Standard is still available (even if your having intermittent issues with it, users can still pay) and we can work through that with them calmly and easily. Note – there’s still a problem with the above. PayPal Standard WILL be removed from the codebase at some point so if people continue to use it then you still get #1 from above… however, the users that run into that issue have been given plenty of notice to move payment methods and there’s only so much we can do for so long… but we try to reduce the disruption as much as we can.
Correct. PayPal Express uses different credentials from your PayPal account but its relatively easy to set up: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/paypal-express-payment-gateway/#locate |
|
|
Hi there, I thought it best to give you a heads-up over the PayPal payment methods. In the next major release over Event Espresso (EE5) we will be deprecating the current PayPal payment methods within core (in the same way mentioned above) and including ‘PayPal Commerce’ which is the latest integration with PayPal. The next version of Event Espresso is due out soon (within the next couple of weeks, if not sooner) so before you move to Express and then move again to PayPal Commerce you may be better off waiting for the next release and just switching straight over to Commerce. |
|
|
oh, geez, thanks for the warning. I just got PayPal Express up and we were going to use that… What your are telling me about EE5 upgrade doesn’t seems consistent with your earlier statement saying “We can remove them from the product and tell you we no longer support them you and need to switch payment methods… that’s a pretty bad experience for users.”? But ok, probably changing to something new anyway, just a matter of to what. Or I’ll wait till our big event in June is over to upgrade EEx. So another follow on question – if I disable a Payment Method, specifically Braintree, are all the settings erased, or are they preserved and that method could just be re-enabled if something unhappy happens with PayPal? Thanks again! |
|
How so? We are deprecating payment methods, which means we’ll be leaving them within the codebase so they continue to work for existing users but won’t show up for new users which is what I posted about HERE. The reason I mentioned the above to you is you were about to move payment methods to use Express, so rather than moving payment methods once then updating and seeing that we now recommend you use PayPal Commerce over the one you’ve just moved to, you may have wanted to wait for the update.
No, the settings are saved within the database and we don’t remove those on deactivating the payment method. |
|
Apologies, I misunderstood the description of deprecating. I understand now; all good.
Ok, that’s good for me. On a related note, is there info I can find about the impact on my current and future events from the transition to EE5? We have our one big yearly event (300-500 registrations) in June set up and about to launch, so for me this is either upgrade ‘immediately’ or in July. And then there’s the old rule about “never use a .0 release.” Thanks! |
|
Not yet, no. EE5 has a lot of changes, we’ve completely rebuilt the event editor, cleaned up a lot of the code, applied PHP8 compatibility changes, improved sanitation and built frameworks within core which will allow us to build out newer features ‘easier’ moving forward. In short, a LOT has gone into EE5 so I can’t give you an accurate description of the impact it may have. However, I can tell you 2 that although is a database migration within EE5 (meaning we change something within the database between EE4.10.45 and EE5) it is safe to switch back to EE4.10.45.p should you install EE5 and find an issue preventing your registrations from working so push comes to show you can always re-install that version (yes I know that’s not ideal, I just mean for a quick fix to get you back up and running should it be needed etc) We’ve tested it against all kinds of different setups but your right in that we simply can’t test every possible situation, especially within WordPress countless plugin/theme combinations. Do you have a staging/dev site? I can send you a copy of EE5 to test out should if you’d like. We’ve been running EE5 on our sister site (EventSmart.com) for a long time and now run into issues. |
|
|
I do have a staging site, I’d be pleased to get a copy of 5 and ‘road test’ it a little. Just to be clear, I imagine you’ll be supporting EE4 for a while, so I don’t need to rush into the transition? Thanks again! |
|
Sure, I’ll get you the latest EE5 version packaged up and send it over today to test 🙂
It really depends on your expectation of ‘supporting EE4’ there. EE5 basically IS EE4 with some updates, if you are referring to the way we are with EE3 -> EE4 then no, as it’s not the same kind of jump. With EE3 to EE4 we designed a completely new system, the database schema is totally different and in short EE4 is basically a completely different product to EE3. You need that transition time as a lot changed not just in appearance but in data and how your theme was used etc etc. EE4 didn’t support everything EE3 did and we gave users the choice to update when needed. EE4 -> EE5 isn’t the same kind of jump, EE5 is an improvement on EE4 base so it does everything the current version does in almost the same/similar way so its not the same kind of transition. The current EE4 event editor has its own limitations which you start to run into as you use more datetimes/tickets etc. We discovered more of those issues as we started to develop the Recurring Events Manager (REM) so we redesigned the editor and added support for REM within that, then updated the codebase to clean up etc etc Eventually we may switch from EE4,EE5, EEX to just ‘Event Espresso’ as we expect this current data schema to last a long time. We can run migrations as we need to change things and those apply throughout becuas of the migration system we designed in EE4. So supporting older versions isn’t really how Event Espresso will work, officially we support the current latest version but obviously, we are aware that applying updates on live sites takes time and people wait for quiet times in registrations. I’m not going to sit here saying you need to update right now or I’m not helping you with your issue but also can’t officially support older versions for months whilst waiting for people to update, unfortunately, it’s just not sustainable that way. |
|
|
Ok, thanks for the insights. I’m really only thinking of doing the transition in June, 3 months away. I’m a ‘one man IT department’ here and I’ve got enough on my plate with supporting our big event right now. After june 3 I’ll be having work withdrawl and can fit the transition in. Looking forward to that beta copy. |
|
| This reply has been marked as private. | |
| This reply has been marked as private. | |
|
You’re most welcome 🙂 |
|
The support post ‘PayPal options’ is closed to new replies.
Have a question about this support post? Create a new support post in our support forums and include a link to this existing support post so we can help you.
