ActiveMerchant's support for determining the account status (verified/unverified) of a PayPal Express Checkout customer/buyer

Question

I am currently working on a Ruby-on-Rails web-application that accepts PayPal payments through PayPal's Express Checkout and ActiveMerchant. I have done several research on ActiveMerchant's support for determining if a customer/buyer has paid using either a verified or unverified PayPal account but I got no luck on finding a helpful guide.

I find it also that ActiveMerchant is currently not well-documented so it's not that helpful at all.

Below are the relevant codes that my project is currently using. On PaymentsController#purchase, I temporarily used the #params['protection_eligibility'] and the #params['protection_eligibility_type'] methods of the ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalExpressResponse object that is returned by the EXPRESS_GATEWAY.purchase method call, to assess if a PayPal customer/buyer has a verified/unverified PayPal account. Later I found out that this is not a reliable basis for knowing the customer's account status.

I hope somebody can give me a wisdom on knowing whether a PayPal customer/buyer has a verified/unverified account using Ruby-on-Rails' ActiveMerchant or using other alternatives on Rails.

# config/environments/development.rb
config.after_initialize do
  ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :test
  paypal_options = {
      # credentials removed for this StackOverflow question
      :login => "",
      :password => "",
      :signature => ""
  }
  ::EXPRESS_GATEWAY = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalExpressGateway.new(paypal_options)
end

# app/models/payment.rb
class Payment < ActiveRecord::Base
  # ...
  PAYPAL_CREDIT_TO_PRICE = {
      # prices in cents(US)
      1  =>  75_00,
      4  => 200_00,
      12 => 550_00
  }
  STATUSES  = ["pending", "complete", "failed"]
  TYPES     = ["paypal", "paypal-verified", "paypal-unverified", "wiretransfer", "creditcard"]
  # ...
end

# app/controllers/payments_controller.rb
class PaymentsController < ApplicationController
  # ...
  def checkout
    session[:credits_qty] = params[:credit_qty].to_i

    total_as_cents = Payment::PAYPAL_CREDIT_TO_PRICE[session[:credits_qty]]
    setup_purchase_params = {
        :allow_guest_checkout => true,
        :ip => request.remote_ip,
        :return_url => url_for(:action => 'purchase', :only_path => false),
        :cancel_return_url => url_for(:controller => 'payments', :action => 'new', :only_path => false),
        :items => [{
                       :name => pluralize(session[:credits_qty], "Credit"),
                       :number => 1,
                       :quantity => 1,
                       :amount => Payment::PAYPAL_CREDIT_TO_PRICE[session[:credits_qty]]
                   }]
    }

    setup_response = EXPRESS_GATEWAY.setup_purchase(total_as_cents, setup_purchase_params)
    redirect_to EXPRESS_GATEWAY.redirect_url_for(setup_response.token)
  end

  def purchase
    if params[:token].nil? or params[:PayerID].nil?
      redirect_to new_payment_url, :notice => I18n.t('flash.payment.paypal.error')
      return
    end

    total_as_cents = Payment::PAYPAL_CREDIT_TO_PRICE[session[:credits_qty]]
    purchase_params = {
        :ip => request.remote_ip,
        :token => params[:token],
        :payer_id => params[:PayerID],
        :items =>  [{
                        :name => pluralize(session[:credits_qty], "Credit"),
                        :number => 1,
                        :quantity => 1,
                        :amount => Payment::PAYPAL_CREDIT_TO_PRICE[session[:credits_qty]]
                    }]
    }

    purchase = EXPRESS_GATEWAY.purchase total_as_cents, purchase_params
    if purchase.success?
      payment = current_user.payments.new
      payment.paypal_params = params
      payment.credits = session[:credits_qty]
      payment.amount  = Payment::PAYPAL_CREDIT_TO_PRICE[session[:credits_qty]]
      payment.currency = "USD"
      payment.status = "complete"
      if(purchase.params["receipt_id"] && (purchase.params["success_page_redirect_requested"] == "true"))
        payment.payment_type = "creditcard"
      else
        if purchase.params['protection_eligibility'] == 'Eligible' && purchase.params['protection_eligibility_type'] == 'ItemNotReceivedEligible,UnauthorizedPaymentEligible'
          payment.payment_type = 'paypal-verified'
        else
          payment.payment_type = 'paypal-unverified'
        end
      end
      payment.ip_address = request.remote_ip.to_s
      payment.save!

      SiteMailer.paypal_payment(payment).deliver
      SiteMailer.notice_payment(payment).deliver

      notice = I18n.t('flash.payment.status.thanks')
      redirect_to profile_url, :notice => notice
    else
      notice = I18n.t('flash.payment.status.failed', :message => purchase.message)
      redirect_to new_payment_url, :notice => notice
    end
  end
  # ...
end

Answer 1

I used PayPal's paypal-sdk-merchant gem to do the job ActiveMerchant wasn't able to help me with (getting the status of a payer's account: verified/unverified PayPal account. I followed the installation of paypal-sdk-merchant on https://github.com/paypal/merchant-sdk-ruby

• gem 'paypal-sdk-merchant'
• bundle install
• rails generate paypal:sdk:install

Then I set-up their samples https://github.com/paypal/merchant-sdk-ruby#samples. After setting-up the samples, go to /samples of your Rails app and you will find a lot of code generator for what ever function you need from PayPal's API. Don't forget to configure your config/paypal.yml. I configured the username, password and signature (can be obtained from your PayPal sandbox specifically your test seller account) and removed the app_id in my case.

I obtained the following code for getting a PayPal payer's account status (verified/unverified) using PayPal's samples (/samples) and placed it on a class method of a model in my app:

def self.get_paypal_payer_status(transaction_id)
  require 'paypal-sdk-merchant'
  api = PayPal::SDK::Merchant::API.new

  get_transaction_details = api.build_get_transaction_details({
    :Version => "94.0",
    :TransactionID => transaction_id
  })
  get_transaction_details_response = api.get_transaction_details(get_transaction_details)

  get_transaction_details_response.payment_transaction_details.payer_info.payer_status
end

Answer 2

I'm not familiar with ActiveMerchant so I can't tell you specific to that, but with any Express Checkout implementation you can use GetExpressCheckoutDetails to obtain the payers information which will include a PAYERSTATUS parameter with a value of "verified" or "unverified".

It's an optional call, but I would assume ActiveMerchant is probably including it so you just need to track that down and pull that parameter accordingly.

Alternatively, you can use Instant Payment Notification (IPN) to receive transaction information and you will get back a payer_status parameter here as well.