It is with great pleasure I can announce that I finally got to level 101 on Overwatch! Oh, wait you’re not here for that. Ahh well that should get some people commenting things like “noob I am level 606.” etc etc.
The last few weeks we have been working on making paying with PayPal easier on Green Man Gaming. Currently the process is as follows:
- Add game to your basket.
- Go to checkout page
- Click PayPal and then place order
- Go to PayPal
- Enter your username and password (unless you remembered it with PayPal one touch)
- Confirm payment
- Redirect to Green Man Gaming
- Get key
- Profit
As you can see, PayPal is currently quote a long winded process. What we are going at the moment is using “Paypal In-Context” which is one of the many confusing options PayPal has. This means you can stay on our web site instead of redirecting to PayPal. After clicking “Place Order” a popup appears and then you enter your username and password directly into a model supplied by PayPal. You can see some technical details at https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/express-checkout/in-context-checkout-overview/
Well, that’s one step down, come on Doc, I can buy on Amazon with one click, you can do better than that. So yeah, you’re right. PayPal also offer something called,” Billing Agreements”. This is just another fancy PayPal way of saying ‘remember my details for next time’. We have added a checkbox on the PayPal section which says “Remember my details” and “Use my saved PayPal details”. If you check the Remember my details checkbox, next time you come to purchase, you can check ‘use my saved details’ and then we skip steps 4,5,6 and 7.
One of the fun challenges we had with implementing these two features together was that PayPal have recently changed their in-context in a way that means you have to show their own button. The principle makes sense, every website seems to come up with their own variation on the PayPal logo and this is a way for PayPal to protect their brand. This however meant that we had to drop our own ‘Place order’ button when you click on pay with PayPal. We also had to create our own version of the PayPal button just so that we could get the remember my last details to work as their own button doesn’t support it. We hope to have these new PayPal features out shortly, they are going through QA at the moment but will be checked by PayPal before we can let you guys loose on it.
I guess I should briefly mention a few other improvements that have already been deployed. We have been quietly tweaking the Buzz feed. All threads are now collapsed by default, upon opening the page. We had feedback, that you guys preferred it that way so you can find things easier.
Currencies also changed slightly over the past week. In the past we locked your currency to, your account. So if you created your account in the UK and visited America, as soon as you logged in, your prices would switch from dollars to pounds. We have now changed this so that your currency is not account locked. If you are in America, then you will always see USD prices, no matter where you signed up.
Have a great weekend and see you in a few weeks or in an Overwatch game.
