Building eCommerce Applications

Chapter 13. Magento, Part 3: Accepting PayPal Payments

Travis Robertson

Magento is an extremely powerful, open source ecommerce platform that was recently acquired by eBay, the parent company of PayPal. In my current series of articles, I’m covering Magento’s various components and how you can make use of the platform for your own ecommerce needs.

In Part 1 of this series, I took you step by step through the installation and setup of Magento. I pointed out some of the gotchas along the way and the various configuration options available to you. When we were done, we had a working (albeit a rather plain) ecommerce site set up.

In Part 2, we looked at getting products into your new Magento store. We discussed how Magento organizes products and inventory into categories and subcategories, and covered some of the potential configuration options. In that article, I also gave you some homework: getting your products into your new system so that we can begin the process of accepting payment.

And that’s where we find ourselves today. After all, what good is a store if you have a whole bunch of products and no way to accept payment for said products? Not very good at all. We’re not running a charity (unless, of course, you are running a charity). So now we’ll look at accepting payment in your new Magento installation.

In this article, we’ll be configuring PayPal for payments and walk step by step through the process of getting it set up. Obviously, there are myriad ways you can accept payment, ...