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I'm trying to set up payment processing for my web app where I've gameified charitable donations.

My goal is as follows:

  1. User on my website wants to unlock a feature or perk by donating to an arbitrary charity.
  2. I redirect them to some payment processor where the money goes directly to the charity.
  3. The user is redirected back with proof of payment, and I unlock the feature.

I don't want to deal with having any sort of liability as a "business" or any of the risks associated with accepting money into an account I control. I just want proof that the payment happened.

Most charities use Paypal to process payments, so let's assume the payment system is PayPal. Is there any way at all I can do this? Hacky solutions and unconventional routes that require some extra work on the user's end are also welcome.

EDIT for clarity:

I'm not looking for code, but instead for recommendation of a service or payment workflow that is capable of this feature. Thanks!

Zak
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subdavis
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    Sorry but you should really have an issue with some code to ask a question. You can't use Stack Overflow to get others to make things from scratch, this is probably why your question has been downvoted. Even if you're not sure where to start, have a go at making this, post your code and - if you can't get it to work - explain what's wrong. Good luck! – Zak Mar 02 '17 at 22:27
  • I'd like to beg to differ. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2647430/building-a-complete-online-payment-gateway-like-paypal?rq=1 is the number one related question, in which the asker wanted to know how to build from scratch. It served as my template for asking this question because of such positive community reception. – subdavis Mar 02 '17 at 22:49
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    Personally, I'm not convinced that question is best suited to SO - see http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve. Nevertheless, that question is perhaps asked in a more theoretical rather than practical way. I feel that yours is different as it requires someone to write code for you. Sorry if I have misunderstood your question, but if that's not what you're asking I think you should probably make it clearer. – Zak Mar 02 '17 at 22:58
  • @Zak I have upvoted your comment. But after a second look at the question , It seems to me an interesting use case and answer to how to tackle this will benefit the community. I don't think OP is asking for an implementation from scratch. – gipsy Mar 02 '17 at 23:02

2 Answers2

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May stab at this use case at hand:

Let the user complete the payment for his selected charity at say paypal and give the user an option to upload the receipt at your webapp(may be a pdf). To begin with you can eyeball the receipt and give the user the credit(On your review admin screen?). But if you want to go fancy you can implement some ocr and automatically substantiate the payment receipt.

Or you can even make it much simpler by auto accepting the receipts by default in the beginning and see how many are cheating on you and then decide to implement the verification. Some time a user taking pain to upload the receipt itself is a proof that he did the right thing.

gipsy
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  • While this isn't the solution I'll be going with, I think it's a better solution to the general case, so I'll mark this as correct. – subdavis Mar 03 '17 at 14:49
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Another approach would be to use email processing. Provide the user with a disposable email address, and instruct them to provide this address for the receipt.

This won't work for every charity, but in my case, the charity requires an email address to give. Simply use a service like mailgun to process the "Thanks for your donation" email.

It's not as fast as an HTTP callback, but the function is roughly the same.

subdavis
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