Payment choices

I looked at other threads about my topic; however, I am still confused on how to proceed.

My customer would like to have two (2) options of payment applied to the checkout page. One option would be to go to Paypal (using Paypal Web Standard) to make payment and the other option would to submit order details and shipping information for invoice purposes.

Can there be two buttons on check out page: one for Paypal and another for invoicing. If so, how can I go about doing this? Again, PHP and mySQL is all new to me and I am probably going to need some guidance for this.

Thanks for your assistance.

You should get your checkout crafted with the Payments Standard first. Once you have the checkout working fully with Payments Standard then adding the option to be invoiced instead will be much easier.

The extra checkout will consist of a form and a new confirm and thank you page. The checkout form will gather the user info, then post to the new confirm page. The user will confirm the details then be taken to a thank you page. On the confirm page you are just going to record the details into your database and indicate that the order has been invoiced.

Please post back with any specific questions that you have about any part of this.

Okay, once I get the Paypal Standard set up; what is the best way to get 2nd set of pages (forms, etc) built for the invoicing part. Do you mean I should put another button on the checkout page that will lead to an invoice confirm? Then this checkout page will gather the data (address, email, etc from customer), customer then submits and gets a confirm page.

In addition, I noticed that there is a PayPal Express option. Where can I input that option, if I chose no payment gateway? The client wants to do remote processing, so he doesn't have to worry about all the PCI compliant rules, etc. that deals with credit card transactions. Do I have to go through Payment Gateway with the Paypal Standard option or can I choose no payment gateway?

I looking through all the posts referencing to Paypal Standard, Paypal Express, INP, etc. and my head is spinning.

You would first need to run the checkout wizard to create your PayPal checkout pages. You can use Payments Standard with IPN, or you can make use of Express Checkout. The Express Checkout is a local checkout, the user clicks on the pay with PayPal button then goes to PayPal to login. Then they go back to your site to a confirm page. When they confirm the details the transaction occurs directly with PayPal and the user will be sent to the success or failure page. This is very different that payments standard where you have to use an IPN page to get back the details of the transaction.

If your client has a PayPal business account with the API credentials available to them then I would suggest making use of Express Checkout instead of the Payments Standard.

In either case you will need to generate the first set of checkout pages, then once they are complete and tested to be working you can then craft the other checkout page. You can use the checkout wizard to create these pages, then after they are created you can combine the checkout form on the new checkout page with your paypal checkout page. This part would need to be done manually to make it work this way. Other than this the extra set of checkout pages will be created by the checkout wizard and you should not need to modify them.