Situation

Hope’s Embrace has an annual fundraiser where parents can make a donation, and one night over Easter weekend, Hope’s Embrace will come and “egg” their yard with plastic Easter Eggs filled with candy. The last couple of years Hope’s Embrace would take orders and send the parents to PayPal to make the donations. With their new website, they wondered if they could use the site to take orders and accept payments through PayPal.

Solution

By creating an online signup form that integrates with PayPal, Hope’s Embrace can point parents to the website where they can fill out the form filling in the important information like address, which night over the weekend, they would like the yard to be egged and most importantly, any allergy issues they need to be aware of. After they have completed the form, they will then be redirected to PayPal to make the donation.

Caldera Forms was selected along with its PayPal Express plugin. Caldera Forms allows Hope’s Embrace to design the form to get the required information and select the number of dozens of eggs to be delivered with a minimum of two dozen. Once the parent filled out the form, the form will calculate the amount of the donation and then send that information over PayPal to allow the parent to pay through PayPal or by credit/debit card.

How?

Let’s take a look at the setup. The form was just a basic, what is your information form. Like Joe Friday would say, just the facts.

The first big change came with the need to know how many dozen eggs they wanted. Seems basic but there is a minimum of two dozen, so we needed to have the form not allow them to enter just one. So on the properties for the selection, we needed to set a minimum of 2.

So, if the customer tries to enter only 1 and click the submit, they get a warning that the value must be greater than or equal to 2.

The next part is adding the PayPal information. We needed to make sure that the PayPal account was setup as a business account and then go in and get the necessary information to make the connection. Using the information provided form PayPal at this link, Hope’s Embrace was able to get the account information needed to connect the form their account.

The link will tell you how to obtain the API Username, Password and Signature to fill in the following information in the Processors tab.

Then we needed to tell the form what information we wanted to PayPal. We set it to send the Price, or the Total Cost since this is how we named it in the form.

Now when the customer clicks the form, it redirects them to PayPal to pay with their account or by using a Debit or Credit Card.

This solution will also help Hope’s Embrace with future fundraisers as they can build a new form with the PayPal plugin to sell tickets or any other item.

If you would like more information on how to set up a form like this and would like our help, just contact us and we will be glad to sit down with you and talk through the process.