Say you have a PayPal “Buy Now”-button on your website and you have assigned return URLs like http://example.com/order?done and http://example.com/order?canceled. You can then welcome the user back after a successful payment. But what if you wanted to say something more interesting than just “hey, welcome back” when they click on that “Return to Merchant”-button? And can you know if the order was actually done or canceled? Maybe you’d like to log the transaction in your database and mark a payment as complete or something like that too? In that case you sure can’t trust a simple flag in the address bar…

Payment Data Transfer (PDT) is a secure method to retrieve the details about a PayPal transaction so that you can display them to your customer. It is used in combination with Website Payments Standard, so that after a customer returns to your website after paying on the PayPal site, they can instantly view a confirmation message with the details of the transaction. — PayPal

I’ve tried to figure out how to use PDT and found that most samples and classes to build from are usually quite ugly, old or outdated. I didn’t find them too useful anyways… So, therefore, I’ve tried to do my own thing based on the documentation found on the PayPal Developer websites. (Seriously, how many versions of documents and developer websites do they have anyways? It’s like a complete jungle…)

Since the documentation was a bit of a mess, I thought I make a small tutorial on the steps needed to get started. That way I can learn it better myself and hopefully help some other poor souls that need to figure this stuff out as well. Please provide feedback if you have any! Would love to make this page nicer and clearer if possible 🙂

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