vm with paypal website standard shopping cart

[billpk4]

i confused as to why it can be so hard to use PayPal website standard with VirtueMart.  In my case I would be interested in being able to turn off VirtueMart's shopping cart functionality completely and simply use its ability to be an ecommerce component that generate browse pages, flypages, navigation, etc...

then i'd want to have PayPal website standard handle all shopping cart functionality, inventory management, shipping, etc...  i don't mind if my pages have buttons that look like paypal widgets.

so, how does one simply get: Joomla!+VirtueMart - all VirtueMart shopping cart + PayPal website standard?

[Gamergy]

I'm also interest in finding out how to do this. At the moment, even with Paypal as the only active payment method it still defaults to COD

[billpk4]

yes, i've surfed all through VM and I can not find any simple checkbox to turn off VM's shopping cart, shipping, inventory, billing, etc... functionalities.

i gather many might ask - well then why would you even want VirtueMart?!
- because as an ecommerce storefront (keywords store-Front) it has great functionality:
   - catagory specification
   - product specification
   - browse pages
   - flypages
   - themes
   - usage with Joomla templates (e.g. Shape5 templates)
   - etc...

and, another reason to not use the VM shopping cart and instead to go with the PayPal website standard is to also avoid all of the PCI compliance issues and headaches that for a smaller company one just doesn't want to deal with.  with PayPal website standard, PCI compliance matters are completely in PayPal's court, I don't have to worry about getting VM working either with PayPal or with a merchant gateway such as authorize.net and then with my local bank.

i'm looking for lowest common denominator solutions with headache factors of epsilon at most.

there must be a simple switch to turn this stuff off in the VM admin user interface without requiring code snippets - gosh i hope so!

[ajredding]

Well unless there is something about paypal I don't know there isn't any inventory management.  from the little bit I've dug around in the source code it would be a pretty big undertaking to rewrite a lot of it to make it have a front end of virtemart handling the products and then having paypal be the "shopping cart"  you lose a lot of integration with your site. 

As far as PCI compliance there should be any concern with this because none of the financial data is being passed between the sites.  ALL financial transactions are processed at paypal.  All you are passing between VirtueMart and Paypal is what was in the cart, cost, tax, shipping etc.

What I think is that the paypal standard module was added into virutemart as a start to get it going.  There is a forum post where a few of us has taken that module to a whole different level and really made it work a lot more smooth.  If you are having that much trouble getting data to pass between virtuemart and paypal then it might be something with your host.

If you look at this post here you'll see the start of the improvements
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=49535.msg169004#msg169004

On this post I don't have a screenshot of what is improved in the code but you'll see how much has changed in the code.
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=49535.msg175875#msg175875

[billpk4]

looks really cool what you all are doing.  i definitely appreciate how you are "taking it to the next level".  for myself - i'm to old to write code any more    so... to have PayPal co-exist with VirtueMart and simply use the PayPal buttons as the jumping points would be fine:

here's my review that might be of help to others.  you could help me though by explaining if there is any easy way to turn off VirtueMart's shopping cart, inventory manager, billing manager, sales tax manager, etc... some way i can simply click a radio button, or do a check off box to "No" that I may have missed.

anyway....

I and maybe others can find VirtueMart a bit overkill (because it is so great and comprehensive in featureset!) and i would like to have an intermediate step whereby I use VirtueMart to run the storefront and PayPal to handle the entire shopping cart portion.

starting with the PayPal Website Payment Standard Overview:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside&nav=2.0.0

we can then go to the featureset overview and see the mention of inventory management among other tings:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-feature-list-outside

really all that PayPal Website Payment Standard is providing is a low inventory alert capability - but that's all i really need at this point:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-feature-list-outside#inventory

integration is simply a matter of inserting the PayPal buttons to existing pages, for example the 'Add To Cart' and the 'Buy Now' buttons:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=9GGTDDI448RCZkg1R1ZUi5lJpD-NFdCduL5DXyOgih2sNGhAqq6t-DgTRq8&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f998ca054efbdf2c25fe4a05bcb33bff6aad6e850552f81af

PayPal provides great documentation beyond the simple explanation re: the html required if you desire more info... their Website Payments Standard Integration Paper is excellent:
https://www.paypalobjects.com/WEBSCR-570-20090422-1/en_US/pdf/PP_WebsitePaymentsStandard_IntegrationGuide.pdf

the key with Joomla! and VirtueMart is to just create a custom HTML module for each button:
http://docs.joomla.org/How_do_you_add_a_PayPal_button%3F

so, the "integration" of PayPal website standard is simply a matter of providing the PayPal buttons within VirtueMart as the jumping points to get over to PayPal.  The entire reason why I want to do this is so I can have all elements of the shopping cart, puchase transaction processing, etc.... handled outside of VM and by PayPal thus also outside of my area of responsibility and liability.

my difficulty is in how to easily turn off the shopping cart, inventory management, shipping management, billing, sales tax, etc... within VirtueMart so that they don't get in the way of PayPal.