We use our own shopping cart and pass aggregate cart information to PayPal without a problem. We pass multiple items as delimited text using the item_name field and our session id using the custom field. When I saw that PayPal can accept individual items I felt we could now pass actual items to PayPal so our customers can receive detailed information with their transaction. I tried to use the new process and I am very dissapointed with the results. I am sharaing my results hoping that the problems can be resolved, or to find out how others use these features... 1. When we POST to PayPal the customer sees the 'Send Money' page where there is a link 'View Contents'. Clicking this link goes to a page that allows not only viewing, but the ability to remove items from the cart. ISSUE: My application has already 'locked' the customers order and passed the items to PayPal for payment processing (remember this feature is being used as a payment processor, not a shopping cart). Removal of items outside of our site produces a mismatch in what we think we are selling and what the customer is actually purchasing. This issue alone makes this process not workable. 2. The return and cancel_return URL's do not work. I passed both key value pairs as I do currently. If a customer cancels payment or if the payment is completed, the customer is sent to a PayPal URL, ignoring the values posted. ISSUE: How can I have the customer sent back to my site after a purchase or cancellation? This is also a non-starter. 3. The custom field is not passed via IPN. ISSUE: As I said earlier, I use the 'custom' field as a session id. Without a session id I have no way to link the IPN post back to our internal cart record. I can work around this as I use the CGI path_info data that I add to the return URL. 4. On the Pay or Cancel page the customer can choose between a 'Ship to' select box or a 'No shipping address required' radio button. The 'no_shipping' field is not recognized. ISSUE: We have instant download e-books that are not shipped. We use the 'no_shipping=1' value to remove the choice. I would prefer if the customer did not see the shipping choices to eliminate any possibility of confusion. 5. The 'image_url' field is not used on the payment pages. ISSUE: This is minor but I thought I would mention it. Thanks for reading. I look forward to your input. Below is our URL redirect for your information. We send this from a Perl script. I have modified the site specific data. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr? cmd=_cart &upload=1 &business=xxxxx%40yyy.com &return=https%3A//xxxx.net/cgi-xxx/xxx.cgi/id=zzz &custom=zzz &cancel_return=https%3A//xxxx.net/cgi-xxx/xxx.cgi/id=zzz/cancel=1 &no_shipping=1 &no_note=1 &image_url=https://xxxx.net/xxx/images/hold/tklogo_paypal.gif &item_name_1=A%20Guide%20to%20Testing &item_number_1=D_TEST &amount_1=0.01 &shipping_1=0.00 &shipping2_1=0.00 &handling_1=0.00 &item_name_2=A%20Guide%20to%20Problem%20Management &item_number_2=D_PROBMAN &amount_2=14.95 &shipping_2=0.00 &shipping2_2=0.00 &handling_2=0.00 Andrew Weiner ITtoolkit.com

Stephen,

I am also very interested in seeing solutions to the issues submitted by Andrew.

In addition, I am also interested in knowing if quantity_x is a valid entry field when passing Individual Items to PayPal from a 3rd party shopping cart? If not, then customers are prevented from ordering more than one each of any product or service. The PayPal document at https://paypal.com/cgi-b...md=p/pdn/howto_checkout does not include quantity_x as an option - I hope this is just a short term oversight.

John
Digital Processes