Checkout options

[fusionsp]

Um ... if you have PayPal Express enabled, you DO NOT NEED PayPal IPN installed as well. Doing that gives them TWO PayPal options on the checkout-payment screen, which creates confusion contrary to your stated goal.

hmmm, ok. Then should i disable the paypal express option? I did notice it had paypal twice. Only now, it did something when i clicked on the paypal like and took me there. Like I had mentioned before, when i did not have paypal IPN installed, it allowed a customer to finalize a sale without ever actually buying the product.

Thats why I had asked how to remove the "go to checkout" button in the first place. I looked around paypal, and from what I gathered...the paypal express option should be used in conjuction with buy now buttons??

I guess I am not understanding the real difference from the paypal IPN and paypal Express. I read thru the boards and still dont really understand why one would be used over another. Except for my issue that enabled the sale.

[DrByte]

I looked around paypal, and from what I gathered...the paypal express option should be used in conjuction with buy now buttons??

I guess I am not understanding the real difference from the paypal IPN and paypal Express.

PayPal IPN is "Website Payments Standard", which is PayPal's oldest technology, designed for driving a mock store by putting Buy Now buttons on static HTML pages, creating a sort of add-to-cart service, which then allowed the customer to go to the PayPal side to do checkout.
It's been adapted and retrofitted to work with way more advanced ecommerce systems like Zen Cart, but it has its drawbacks because it's really not designed to be used that way.

Express Checkout, however, is one of their newest technologies, and works far more reliably because it doesn't depend on several quirky makeshift background processes to complete transactions. It does not use any buy-now buttons at all. It's specifically designed to work with database-driven shopping carts such as what Zen Cart provides.

Express Checkout offers two ways to do checkout:
1. The traditional way, via the regular "Go To Checkout" button which you wanted to remove. Customers can then choose "PayPal" on the checkout-payment page, and complete checkout normally.

2. Or they can start by clicking the orange Express Checkout button on their shopping cart page or the login page. That takes them to PayPal immediately to select their way of paying. Then it returns them to your site to finalize shipping and coupon details, and then finally complete the actual payment.

It sounds like something on your site has broken the way #1 above normally works, causing the PayPal option to not appear there the way it should. I can't fix that for you. You'd need to check which of your many addons has affected checkout features and work on fixing it from there.

[fusionsp]

wow, what a mess. Ok, I got it fixed now. While I thought i had removed my merchant service acct, apparently I didnt. And it was set as the default checkout method. And since it was merely turned off, it finalized the transaction anyways.

Thanks for your help. I not only am using the newer paypal express. you rock