The Joys of Paypal Integeration and Financials Transactions

If you are like me, you live in a country that you could say is technologically challenged. I face this problem on daily, weekly, monthly basis whenever I want to try something that is out there, only to find out that it is restricted to USA.

In the global age of the internet I find it Ridikulouse that these types of restrictions apply. I know that in financial situations you have to be careful, and there are a number of regulations that bind us in the way we do things. And I received a harsh cup of reality and  realised this when I started to look at integrating payments processing for project that I'm working on.

I initially wanted to roll my own, and since I'm in the development phase and the interest of the project comes and goes - I have very little money to spend. I cannot spend on subscriptions and jump through hoops one month and loose all interest (change priorities the next month), and then back on the bandwagon the following month.

In this instance I was still in the very much interested phase, so I looked around on how I can roll my own. I soon realised that rolling your own meant that you need Internet Merchant Account - for which you need file applications to a Financial Institutions, who wants to understand your business in detail and requests for a Business Plan etc... All this just to develop. Then it was the payment processors, most want you to sign up straight away and let them know which plan you want to go on to. But I'm still developing my idea.

I then thought of Paypal, I was almost about to go onto Crytocurrency payments which felt a whole lot easier than the getting an Internet Merchant Account. I digress, back to Paypal. I thought of Paypal as a mechanism of accepting and processing the payment - sounded like a brilliant idea. I read article after article on how developer centric they were, and its free to set up a test account. So I did, I created a test account on their sandbox system - everything was falling into place. The next hurdle was the type of product and features that I wanted, this is probably where everything started to fall over.

Its been about two weeks now of researching Paypal alone - the developer centricity that I thought of wasn't actually there. Paypal, from what I can see has spread themselves out way too thin. They have

1. Information on their site that is out of date
2. Information that is missing (i.e demo video gives a 404)
3. Product Names that are confusing (Website Payment Pro, which should not be confused with Payment Pro or Payflow Pro ) - to be fair they do clearly state to customers not be confused with these names.
4. Git Repos that are out of date
5. Confusing messaging (Paypal states that they will continue to support the development of the Classic API and when you goto the GIT Repo of their SDK it states that this is now defunct and for everyone to use REST API - REST API is limited and available in USA, CANADA and the United Kingdom).
6. They also have source code that was not complete (see statement  paymentItem.ItemCategory = (ItemCategoryType)EnumUtils.GetValue(, typeof(ItemCategoryType)); )
7. They don't really support Asp.net MVC... 

To make matters worse i went to Stackoverflow to get assistance, and it doesn't look like that Paypal area gets any love. My question there is still unanswered. Paypal integration is a real struggle, payment processing in general is a struggle. I'll write more as I know more (see the paypal label on the side of this post to see all the other posts about paypal). At this stage I'm still clueless.