[HOW TO] Use the shipping costs within PayPal Standard

I did a little research for a client today on how to use the shipping costs within PayPal Website Payments Standard instead of using the shipping costs within OpenCart. Fortunately, you can do it without modifying the code or installing any extensions. Here are the steps you need to follow to get this working (this is a site-wide fix, so PayPal Standard needs to be the only payment method you use):

1. For each product's settings in the OpenCart admin panel (in Catalog > Products > Edit), make sure that "Requires Shipping" is set to "No". This will skip the shipping step for regular checkout.
2. In your PayPal account settings, navigate to Profile > My selling tools > Shipping calculations.
3. Follow the instructions to create the shipping calculations that you want.
4. For each shipping calculation you create, make sure you DO NOT select "Use the shipping fee in the transaction instead of my calculator's settings".
5. Shipping will be added to the order total once the customer is on the PayPal page.

Caveat: From what I can tell, PayPal does not allow you to offer the customer multiple shipping options. If there are overlapping options that qualify, it will just pick the last one in the list. I don't know if this is a "feature" or a bug, but it means you can only offer a single shipping method when a customer checks out (although you can offer different methods to different locations).

I'm not sure that is the end tho. At this point, opencart sees a $100 order, but paypal has a $110 order because it knows about the shipping. An additional step would be needed on the callback to update the total price... and then with some elfin magic to update the actual totals column for shipping, which is quasi-difficult because there is no totals classing system.

Paypal is a somewhat mutatable creature in this sense. I've seen shops like Deal Extreme make paypal standard work kinda like paypal express, where basically clicking the checkout button takes you to paypal to pay and confirm in "Auth" mode.. Then you are returned to the site to confirm the actual order and it can also populate your shop with the data for address and shipping returned from paypal. Then click the final confirm back on your site and it actually commits the order as a "sale". I've thought about making a reworked paypal to do that as that would then allow you to setup paypal standard to use shipping through their service and opencart would then grab it on the way back in.

Qphoria wrote:I'm not sure that is the end tho. At this point, opencart sees a $100 order, but paypal has a $110 order because it knows about the shipping.

Good point. I guess anyone who would want to use this would have to be OK with their OpenCart sales totals being just for their products. This wouldn't be the end of the world, especially if you were using PayPal for shipping anyway. You'd just have to get your totals reports from PayPal, and not OpenCart.

Qphoria wrote:I've thought about making a reworked paypal to do that as that would then allow you to setup paypal standard to use shipping through their service and opencart would then grab it on the way back in.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder how many people would choose that option for their shipping.

Hello Johnathan
Here is update on information you provided regarding Pal Pal not allowing multiple shipping options: If you have set up multiple shipping options in your shipping calculations inside your pay pal account then pay pal will allow multiple shipping options.

However, it doesnt show up initially when you put through a transaction...when you first connect with pay pal it will give you a shipping calculator which will give you the lowest shipping option, say "shipping standard" as an estimate, then once you go through with the transaction, the next page will give you the option to choose alternative shipping options with different shipping cost, say "shipping expedited" Pay Pay Tech Phone Support says that as long as you reach the initial page of pay pal than you have connected and then it is a matter of making sure that your pay pal account...shipping calculations... is set up correctly and which pay pal tech support will be happy to assist you with.

The other quirk with pay pal is that they will not allow you to use the "sellers account" to test a transaction and the "sand box" mode is really for testing pay pal buttons not 3rd part shopping carts + it is complicated to use and so therefore useless.

I repeat, as long as you get to the initial pay pal page, everything on Open Cart is configured correctly and then you just need to make sure your Pay Pal Shipping Calculations are set properly.

Hi August -- thanks for adding that info. I'm sure other people who are interesting in using PayPal Standard's shipping will find it useful.

Hello Jonathan
The issue about sales totals being different (products only) in open cart and (products + shipping) in pay pal does seem to be an issure. When I asked pay pal about that they said something about the "API"...that the code would need to regrab the shipping information when you return to open cart after transaction is complete. There is a setting inside pay pal that sends the customer back to opencart but they were unclear as to whether the shipping totals would be included. I think he meant that if an overide of code was written that it needed to be in the "API" Since I am not a coder, I leave that to you. Yes I would be interested in having a "code fix" for this.

Are you saying that it's a technical issue that will prevent orders from going through? Or are you saying that you just want the information in OpenCart as well?

Either way, it is a problem, and the module would need to be re-coded. I'll try and look into this in the future, but I won't have time to get to it for a few weeks at the earliest.

Hi,
Has anyone sort out the issue with adding extra shipping costs by paypal during checkout?
I have got 1.5.0.5 version of open cart.
I have set up shipping per item. When customer go to paypal website it shows extra shipping which is set up on paypals profile website. I have ticked the option to override the shipping cost on my profile (shipping calculation) website, but it sill adds the shipping charge from Paypal.
Anyone has got a solution to this?

http://www.slippers4you.com/slippers4you.com

I believe you need to remove all your shipping costs in PayPal. If you search in the forum you should be able to find some other threads on this.