Integrating PayPal with Oracle iStore

The focus of business these days is to increase the customer base. To ensure this any seller has to be customer friendly. Credit card fraud is a very big concern of any customer. Integrating paypal with business is one of the best ways by which one can assure there is no credit card fraud at their end and also they can tap more customers. Oracle iStore is not an exception to this. We have focussed on integrating PayPal with Orace iStore.

PayPal could be integrated into iStore and the buyer could be provided with an option to checkout using paypal.

One of the advantages of using PayPal is, it is very much configurable. The buyer can view the his cart i.e the items he has selected in the iStore, in his paypal account individually or whole of the cart as a single item. This feature is integrated into the prototype that we have developed.

Also, One of the beauties of PayPal is its Instant Payment Notification. PayPal provides us with many options and it is we who can decide on how we want to integrate this. We can actually update our database the moment the payment is done. This is the best way one can actually track the orders. Also, we can post the parameters back on to our server when returning from paypal to our site. But, the disadvantage of this being not many customers want to return to our site after the payment is done. They feel they are done with their business.
So, Instant Payment Notification is the best solution for this and we have integrated this into the prototype that we have developed. Here we have the business logic to see, if it is an authorized user and if it is an authorized transaction. This helps in preventing fraud.

Another feature that we have integrated is the recurring payment using PayPal. By using this option, sellers can provide an option of subscription to the customers. Also, there is an option of unsubscribing through your site. This is an area where we are continuing to focus.

Following are the options that we have with recurring payment.
1. Setup a Descriptive flexfield at the order header level to capture the frequency of the recurring frequency (Monthly, quarterly, yearly etc) and then based on the values of DFF we will create the Invoices by calling the AUTOINVOICE program or Standard APIs to create the invoices in AR.
Steps required
a. Setup a New Invoice source for Invoices.
b. Custom program to retrieve all the data required to Populate AR Invoice Interface table or to AR invoice Apis.
2. Setup a Descriptive flexfield at the order header level to capture the frequency of the recurring frequency (Monthly, quarterly, yearly etc) and then based on the values of DFF , add the new line to same sales order.

3. Setup the DFF at the customer /customer site level and then based on the frequency
a. Create new Sales Order at each occurrence of recurring billing frequency or
b. Add new line to same sales order. In this case we need to populate the DFF at the order header level too to mark it as a recurring sales order.
Steps required
a. Setup a New Invoice source for Invoices.
b. Custom program to retrieve all the data required to populate Order Management API to create Order /lines.
c. Progress Sales Order to Invoicing.