Has anyone found the payment processor documentation very bad
Does anyone else find that the documentation of many payment processors has poor or incomplete documentation on how to use their API? Or is it just being confused?
I recently installed both PayPal and Beanstream and found that both are misleading or not fully documented.
For example, the BeanStream documentation says they will return "message_id" which is great, but no where they tell you what the other id means. It also contains some text, so you can start building the list, but you can't check to make sure you get either valid or one that means it was successful.
Has anyone had this experience?
Change: . I agree that when you email them, they are helpful, but unfortunately most of them are just regular business hours for general technical support (except for an emergency), which is not always useful as it is not the case when I feel like I'm doing my own integration.
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OK, this is not entirely specific to the payment processor documentation, and all things being equal, well-documented APIs will help drive development. for what it's worth, I've worked with paypal, authorize.net, ups and usps APIs and didn't find them frankly confusing (not implying they were a special joy to get through).
which being said, I want the documentation to be similar to PHP. despite being such a scattered language, the documentation is really good.
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Having worked with a lot of APIs not only for payment processors, but for a variety of other ecommerce related web services, I have to say that while the docs may be less stellar, they usually aren't that bad and if you send them an email or call them, they will generally be very helpful.
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This may not be very useful for you, but as you get more experienced with a particular domain, the interfaces become easier. In a weird twist of the world, I've coded a whole bunch of credit card interfaces, and once you get the lingo, they all work the same.
The only other suggestion I would like to suggest is to use support resources besides the provided documentation. We recently worked with a relatively well-known payment gateway, and while their documentation was completely sucking (by their own admission), the support staff were incredibly knowledgeable and more than willing to help / explain.
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I have used Realex and PayPal. Realex documentation is great. Clear and simple. PayPal is absolutely awful terrible. And I'm such a weird person who reads the documentation so well that I know he reads it for fun (I've read the entire OpenID spec, although I have no plans to use it).
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I've only worked with PayPal, but the simple version (where you just created an HTML form on your web page and submitted it using the PayPal button) is very easy to use. And if you're looking for real-time feedback, I've always found it easier to just write a program to periodically check my PayPal email account and parse the payment details from the email itself.
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I've had to use Authorize.net for several sites, and the documentation supplied is "just ok", assuming you are working on a somewhat limited set of technologies for which they supply sample code. It was very easy to get it and run it from PHP, but it is missing when trying to pull off the same thing in ColdFusion.
Several other sites made through PayPal which IMO were much better.
Re: Beanstream you need to login, after which you will see a link with documentation on the left. The design is so "90s" and they recommend using IE.
Re: Paypal I adapted this code from http://www.php-suit.com/paypal for my Zend Framework project. Note: you must have another ssl: // transport wrapper registered, which is visible in phpinfo ()), you will need to configure your code to use curl.
Here's how to get the code using SVN
svn checkout http://paypalphp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ paypalphp-read-only
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