PayPal Buttons & Collecting Extra Information

Hi

We have a page on our website where people can order sets of business cards. You can take a look at it here:

http://www.thehealingtrust.org.uk/businesscards

On the webpage they have the option of choosing a design and a quantity. These options are built in to the PayPal Button.

However, as they're ordering business cards, we need to collect extra information like their address and telephone number. If I add this to the form that gets submitted to PayPal, it just disappears into the ether (PayPal only process specific form fields).

At the moment we're trying to redirect customers to a seperate webpage after they've completed the transaction where they can send us the necessary information, but this is not a good way of doing it, as our customers have to click a link (after they've paid) to get to this page (guess how many have done that so far(!)).

I'd really appreciate anyone's input on what we should be doing to get this working properly. I'm hoping there's something simple I haven't thought about!

Thanks.

Richard

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 7:21 pm Post subject:

There are at least two ways of dealing with this.
1) Put a form with the required details below the design selector.
Have this POST back to your site, where the details are stored and an order reference generated. Have the generated page contain the Paypal form including the order reference. This can be made to auto-submit using the javascript "onload" function, but make sure there's a submit button, just in case.

2) This is the method I use, originally written because the server we were on at the time didn't have php (years ago).
Paypal accept two free-text fields os0 and os1 (together with on0 and on1).
I have several fields needed (membership form), so I have two forms on the page. The first is the form they fill in (visible fields) but NO submit button.
The second form is the Paypal one, all fields are hidden except the submit button (which in this case is actually an image type, but this works as a submit).
When this is clicked, a short script concatenates the various fields and fieldnames into the two Paypal fields.
The information is then returned by Paypal.

You can see this here

.
The Family one is probably the best example, as it has more fields in it.

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