taking payments online - how easy to add to a website?

unwashed potato! · 4 Apr 2016 at 21:16

i've got an online quote system where users input all the information and get a price straight away. they can also book online by 2 more clicks, and then we confirm the request for booking either by email or phone, but mostly by email.

the trouble we're having with this is that like today, someone went through the proccess of getting a quote and booking it, to then let us down and when we turned up today they acted like they didn't ever get a quote nor make a booking, but that infact had and it messed the day up.

I'm thinking to take a deposit for each booking, however this comes up with issues of taking payments online which we currently don't do, and taking a deposit for a job we may not be able to fulfil, like also today we had a request 2 hours ago to book a full house clean for tomorrow. Come on people get organised when moving house! Taking a deposit in that situation would be a pain as we'd have to refund, though i guess that's probably a rather easy process.

any way anyone with suggestions and costs for having a small online payment system added onto an existing site? Ideally i'd be something like a plugin, i just copy a bit of code on the booking page and it's sorted

Dup · 4 Apr 2016 at 21:26

PayPal is the simplest and quickest without committing to a subscription system. It's a good start so you can gauge how popular the system is before maybe committing to a better prospect. You will however have to pay some sort of transaction fee.

PayPal can simply be submitted to via a form and you end up on their gateway page with the right details stored ready for the user to pay. No need for any plugin as such. You can use hidden inouts etc to pass the necessary details along.

If there could be multiple items/products submitted there are plugins like Simplecart which provide a basket front end, however you still end up at the same PayPal gateway page to pay.

For a paid service, Stripe is a popular one, not used it personally but has a nice API and you can do it all voa your front end so no diverts to 3rd party pages which can out some people off.

You'll also need to consider an SSL certificate which are about £150 for 3 years or so.

Mynight · 4 Apr 2016 at 23:08

Braintree v.zero used it quite a few times. Think they're doing zero charges up to £30,000 currently on EU payments. Takes variety of things including PayPal(think they're owned by PayPal now).

Tiny bit of code and can customise it using your own form to fit in on site.

There's some options you don't need SSL but requires forwarding to their site rather than doing it all in house.

mtalk · 5 Apr 2016 at 06:24

Yes to start fast you can use paypal or stripe to get online payment from your site directly.

meandu229 · 5 Apr 2016 at 07:38

I've integrated PayPal into a systembefore and was a pleasure to do so. Lots of documentation and help meant it was quite simple if you can code. Stay away from world pay though. Worst documentation I've ever seen.