PayPal records

Hello,

I am considering purchasing Joom Donation, but I had a question about what data is sent to PayPal. If I provide fields for the user to select a campaign, or otherwise provide comments about the donation they are making, how much of this information (ie: which fields, if any) appear on the payment alert that is sent to us by PayPal. I like the fact that Joom Donations allows the user to provide all of this information, but our donations are being processed by someone who does not have access to the back end of our web site. For example, if the user enters an address, is that address sent to paypal, or do they need to enter it there, too? It would be quite a lot for us to ask the user for their address, when PayPal is going to ask them twice (once for the payment address, and a second time for the "shipping address". The shipping address is the address reported by PayPal on the transaction alert. What about campaign information, or other comments? Are these passed to PayPal? Thanks for the information.

Best Regards,

Jon

Hello?

I guess that answers my question, then...

I am very much interested in this question as well...I just purchased DTDonate only to find out that those vital information are not sent over when we receive payment notification by Paypal. Paypal just shows "Online Donation: in the description field even though we have a custom field defined in form sent over to Paypal by the DTdonate extension. So there is no way for our handlers knowing what campaign or donation type our donors are giving toward. Unfortunately, DTdonate support is ridiculously very terrible, so money wasted down the drain. I am therefore eagerly looking forward to response to this thread tod determine if I need to switch to JoomDonate...hopefully support here will be better than the Do Nothing support from the other guys. Please don't prove me wrong JooDonation support team!

Hi

You can pass the Campaign Title to Paypal using [CAMPAIGN_TITLE] tag (just go to Joom Donation -> Translation, find the JD_ONLINE_DONATION language item and add the tag to the language item). After that, campaign title will be passed to Paypal.

For custom field, unfortunately, it is not possible to Pass it to Paypal without doing some code modification .

Regards,

Tuan

Thanks...this is one issue I have with the other competitive donation extension. The developer was not willing to help even though it appears that the issue was not that complicated.

Here is what I found out about hpw the custom field data is generated from the form and sent to the database

An array set is generated comprising all of the custom field
The array is echo'ed out with other form records for donor to confirm before sending to Paypal/Gateway
At this time the entire form record is added to the database.
If donor payment goes through the changes are committed to the database
If donor cancel payment at the gateway, the record is deleted from the database

So the question is why is it challenging to split out the array and have the form send any individual array value (custom field) to the payment gateway? This can then be substituted with the item description currently being sent to the payment gateway?

Please advise...I really need to switch over to JoomDonation but it will be no point if I am going to face the same challenge with as with the other competitive extension I am currently sweating on...

At least, credit to you unlike the other guy...you are being responsive to customer needs...

Administrator wrote:

Hi

You can pass the Campaign Title to Paypal using [CAMPAIGN_TITLE] tag (just go to Joom Donation -> Translation, find the JD_ONLINE_DONATION language item and add the tag to the language item). After that, campaign title will be passed to Paypal.

For custom field, unfortunately, it is not possible to Pass it to Paypal without doing some code modification .

Regards,

Tuan

So the question is why is it challenging to split out the array and have the form send any individual array value (custom field) to the payment gateway? This can then be substituted with the item description currently being sent to the payment gateway?

=> There are two reasons :

1. Not many customers need it. Usually campaign title should be enough for them .

2. The payment gateway doesn't accept all fiends. They only accept several fields. So for example, if you have a custom field called jd_field_name and passed to the gateway, the gateway won't know about this field and it won't store the value....

Hope the explanation is clear to you .

Regards,

Tuan

Tuan - Thanks for the response.

1. Not many customers need it. Usually campaign title should be enough for them

Here is one reason why sending custom field to the payment gateway may be important especially for a non profit organization.

We take donation online and we have had to create custom field that describes different type of donations. So instead of creating six different campaign, we just add those donation type as radio fields that donors can select from. That way we only have to create and manage one donation form for multiple "campaign/donation type" instead of six. Based on the current configuration of JoomDonation, it means that there is no way for us to know what type of donation the donor is giving toward via our gateway (Paypal) as all donation are recorded as "Online donation" or whatever hard coded label we assign as campaign name. The email confirmation sent to us by Paypal and record that our auditors get by generating reports via Paypal is showing Online donation for all donations without specifying whether the donation is an offering, a tithe, building fund, etc.

2. The payment gateway doesn't accept all fiends. They only accept several fields. So for example, if you have a custom field called jd_field_name and passed to the gateway, the gateway won't know about this field and it won't store the value....

I know the gateway only specific fields, no doubt. All I am proposing is that we find the way to split up the custom filed array and pass the variable configured in the backend to the campaign name that is sent to Paypal or other gateway, which is then listed as the item description that Paypal receives from the form record. This is what we did when our site used to be a ColdFusion site. Now that we switch to php via Joomla, it is messed things up....The solution we need must be able to work this way as well.

BTW - I tried calling you on Skype but could not get through to discuss this further. I am in CST time zone.

I think I'm with Foley on this, but I'm not sure if maybe we are misunderstanding each other. I also manage a church web site, and would like to provide a drop down list or set of radio buttons so the donor can choose where the donation can be applies (General Fund, Capital Campaign, Outreach, etc). From what has been said on this thread, am I to assume that the campaign must be set once for the entire module? If so, this means that we must have a separate donation form for each type of donation. As Foley said, many folks receiving donations would like the convenience of providing a single form for multiple campaigns. This also makes it less confusing for the donors.

If I am misunderstanding something, please clarify. I really need an extension that can do this - otherwise, it is trivial to make my own PayPal button pre-configured to a specific campaign. Ideally, we would also like to add a comments field, similar to what PayPal provides, but that would be gravy. For example, someone could give money in memory of a loved one. I think there are more customers than you think who would use this.

Regards,
Jon

Any update on this request...this is a much desired feature by charity organizations like ours. It is the only reason I have not transferred over from the other guys to yours. We need to have specific campaign type sent over with the payment to Paypal, and not just a generic campaign label for all donations.