Payment gateway

Hi jenmarisa,

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) comes with PayPal Standard and Amazon Payments built in. Displaying the credit card icons is optional and what you’ll want to display, if anything, depends on which payment gateways you use and what cards they accept.

The text that says ‘You will also need to configure your gateway settings if you are accepting credit cards’ can be a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with the EDD payment gateways. That text is meant to convey that checking the boxes to display the icons doesn’t configure the payment gateway settings themselves.

For example, when using PayPal Standard you need to supply the email address of your PayPal account so when customers buy, PayPal knows to give you the money. You won’t need to do anything else in EDD for PayPal Standard. You can link your bank account on paypal.com to transfer your funds from PayPal to your bank. EDD doesn’t do anything with that part.

We also offer a number of paid credit card gateway extensions that, if used, require additional configuration.

To configure each gateway that you plan on using, go to that gateway’s settings page. Here’s a screenshot to help clarify (the red box): https://cl.ly/03370B2d1k3i

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Hello John.

Many thanks for coming back to me so quickly.
Your answer does help.

Can I ask two further things:
Firstly, using just PayPal, is there a way of testing that the whole process works, and that the customer receives the PDF of the ebook I’m selling (I’ve added the link to it from where I’ve got it stored in ‘Media’ on the WP dashboard of the site) at the end of the whole process, after they’ve gone through PayPal and paying by card/their PayPal account? (I’m guessing the answer is no, because that involves PayPal’s systems rather than just yours, but I thought I’d ask?)

Secondly, if I say I would like to add the ability for customers to avoid PayPal & just pay using either Visa or Mastercard, (because hardly anyone uses anything other than those two in the UK), which is the best paid credit card gateway extension to use? I clicked on the link you kindly included, but to the uninitiated, that page was pretty mind-boggling with choice!

Many thanks

Happy to help!

There are a couple things you can do to test the first question. You can set up a PayPal sandbox account and make a test purchase. We’ve outlined that process here. Admittedly PayPal’s sandbox isn’t very fun to deal with, so you might want to make a small real purchase with a discount code if the sandbox gets too tedious. You can also test with a 100% discount code if you want to just bypass PayPal and see what it looks like after a completed purchase.

I’ll briefly explain what happens. When using PayPal, the customer clicks the purchase button your site, goes to paypal.com, makes the payment, and returns to your site and lands on the purchase confirmation page. This will have a receipt with the payment details and links to download the product. They will also get an email that contains the same receipt information and download links.

For accepting credit cards, we recommend Stripe. They’re so easy to deal with. One thing you’ll need to do for accepting credit cards on your site, if you haven’t already, is set up a SSL security certificate on your site. This ensures when your customer enters a credit card number on your site, it is transmitted to the credit card processor over a secure link. We have some documentation about that here. Generally, the best option for getting a SSL certificate on your site is to contact your web host about it. They handle all the technical details of that process and can usually have it set up pretty quickly.

A brief explanation of what happens with Stripe. The customer stays on your site, instead of going to another site like PayPal works. After the payment is processed over the secure link, the customer is automatically redirected to the purchase confirmation page that contains the receipt and download links. An email is sent to the customer using this method too.

Hello again,

Once again, thanks for being prompt.
Despite having an SSL certificate, I’ve decided to only use PayPal, seeing as, once they’re taken to PayPal there’s an option on there to use card payment anyway.

I have just made an actual purchase, to test the entire process.
I did it on an iPad (whereas I normally do everything on my laptop).

I did find a few problems.
Firstly, the final email confirmation that says, ‘Thank you for your purchase. Please click on the link(s) below to download your files’ did not contain a link to the file.
All it had was the name of the website in blue, which was just a link to our home page. Please advise further on that, as if a customer receives that they won’t be too happy!

Secondly, on the plugin, under settings>Misc>file downloads, I selected ‘Forced’. I assumed this would mean that the book the customer has just purchased would automatically start downloading on to the device they’re on. This didn’t happen.

Thirdly, during the purchase process, everything seemed to freeze on the page that says, ‘If you’re not automatically re-directed in 10 seconds, click here’. After about 15 seconds I clicked on the link. The screen changed to a blank screen but froze for a good while, then the ebook opened. However, by accident I pressed the main ‘Home’ button on the iPad (the main, single button on an iPad) and there was no way of going back to the PDF file of the book. It was just lost. It hadn’t downloaded, it wasn’t there if I pressed back on to the google app, it wasn’t on iBooks. It was just lost.

I hope all that makes sense? I’m desperate to get this sorted so we can start selling the book with the confidence that the process works. many thanks once again.

Sorry, also, there was no link to download the product on the purchase confirmation page either.
It was all pretty confusing (& disappointing) to me, so it’ll be the same for a customer.

Thanks.

Hi,

I think you’ll find our Getting Started documentation very helpful for all this: https://docs.easydigitaldownloads.com/

For your missing download links, that usually happens when payments aren’t marked as Complete. That usually happens when the PayPal IPN isn’t configured. We have a help file about that here: https://docs.easydigitaldownloads.com/article/190-payments-not-marked-as-complete

The Forced/Redirect download method is explained here: https://docs.easydigitaldownloads.com/article/1181-what-is-the-difference-between-forced-download-and-redirect-download

The iBooks app doesn’t import the download of PDF files from websites. They require you sync them. That’s an Apple limitation. They can view it by downloading it in the browser and viewing it then, or by saving it to their iCloud drive or something like that. More info here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201478

Hello again.

Thank you for the information on IPN settings. It was very useful.
I have now configured IPN on my PayPal account.
The Forced/Redirect link just explains what they are, which I already knew. My issue was that it didn’t start downloading the eBook. Will the fact that the IPN is now configured on my PayPal account fix this issue?

Many thanks again,

Martin.

Hey Martin,

Yes, having the IPN configured properly should fix the issue with buyers not having download links after purchase.