A client has contacted me asking for help with Paypal integration on her website. She said it was created 20 years ago using hand-coded PHP.
The site is for a business that she used to run publishing scientific papers. She no longer does that, and she has closed down the business and the associated Paypal account. The site still exists, though, as an archive for the papers she published and she does still get enquiries from customers wanting to purchase the articles on her site. They are unable to do that, as the Paypal account no longer exists. So she wants to change the site to connecty it to a different Paypal account.
The person who handles her hosting has disappeared to Poland and told her he cannot do this, which is why she has approached me. I have never connected a website to Paypal before, so I'm having to work out what to do from scratch (although I'm not put off by that).
A quick look at the site has shown me that it doesn't seem to use any of the common eCommerce platforms, or any kind of CMS. The screen layout isn't responsive. I haven't looked at the PHP on the server end, but I'm expecting it to be very dated.
The site connects to Paypal via an HTML form, which looks something like this:
<form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value=[encrypted button id]>
<input type="hidden" name="on0" value="All back issues">All back issues
<select name="os0">
<option value="All back issues - incl. shipping">All back issues - incl. shipping £345.00 GBP</option>
</select>
<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="GBP">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_GB/i/btn/btn_cart_LG.gif" name="submit">
And a search for the purpose of the hidden fields tells me that the hosted_button_id field seems to be something that is
"Required for buttons that have been saved in PayPal accounts. Otherwise, not allowed."
That suggests to me that I will not be able to use the existing mechanism to connect the site to a new Paypal account because I will not be able to create hosted buttons linked to specific products in the new account. So my question is have I got that right? And, if it is still possible to change the site to use a more up-to-date mechanism to connect to Paypal, is that really feasible given the age of the site?
I'd like to be able to tell the client one of:
a) yes, this is a simple job
b) yes, this is possible but it's a much bigger job than you'd expect, or
c) this is such a big job that it's really not worth it for the sake of a few occasional transactions
So any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
