4.19 Payment Processing

Scoop supports two methods of payment processing: Paypal, which requires nothing more than a paypal account, and Credit Card processing, which requires a secure server and a merchant account.

4.19.1 Paypal

To use payment processing, you must first add another prerequisite to Scoop's list: Crypt::SSLeay. This perl module allows LWP::UserAgent to make requests to https servers, and therefore allows Scoop to talk to Paypal's servers to confirm payments. Crypt::SSLeay requires the openssl libraries, which you probably already have. If you don't, you can get openssl from your install disk or, failing that, http://www.openssl.org/. Crypt::SSLeay installs from CPAN.

Once Crypt::SSLeay is properly installed, open up scoop/etc/startup.pl and uncomment the lines

use Scoop::Billing;
use Scoop::Billing::Paypal;

but leave the LPERL and Linkpoint lines alone as they're specific to the credit card processing and aren't needed for paypal payments.

For those two modules to be activated in Scoop, you must fully stop, then start Apache. They will not be brought in with a restart.

In the Site Controls Admin Tool (A.6) set the variable paypal_business_id to the email address of your paypal account and the variable secure_site_url to the address of your secure Scoop site. (If you do not have an SSL-enabled server, you can put a non-secure URL here, but then your half of the payment process won't be encrypted. Since the actual payment is done on Paypal's secure servers this isn't too bad, but you really should have a secure server if you're doing payment processing.)

In the Cron Admin Tool (A.14) enable the cron item paypal_bill_orders and make sure your system cron is hitting Scoop's cron frequently enough. See section 3.4 for more information on Scoop's cron.

Finally, turn on the variable ads_use_paypal so paypal appears as an option at the payment stage.

4.19.2 Credit cards

If you'd like to set up credit card processing, contact rusty@kuro5hin.org for very reasonable hourly rates.

Credit card processing requires a merchant account. Scoop currently works with Linkpoint, which requires you to purchase a proprietary perl module. Talk to rusty about how to set it up.