How to Implement User Log-in with PayPal
Curiosity is one of the most important traits in our job. The other day, I found myself exploring PayPal documentation to find something interesting to learn (and share). After a while, I stumbled upon the login with the PayPal tool.
With
the “PayPal login” tool,
your users can authenticate into your application using PayPal. It’s the same
procedure we already know for Facebook, or maybe Twitter and GitHub.
Using
this type of authentication is recommended if you want to integrate it with an
e-commerce website, but you can use it in every situation and application that
requires a user account or membership.
Why use ‘Login with PayPal’?
One of
the most important reason to use it is simplicity. Your
user will not need to remember another set of credentials – the same advantage
OAuth via FB, Twitter, etc have. Also, the login procedure is absolutely
secured: fewer concerns for you. However, it’s not just an email and a
password.
When
you create a PayPal account there is a lot of information that you specify. This
info, using the APIs, can also be used in your application in many useful ways.
One of the best examples I can give is the e-commerce one: why bother your user
by asking him for a shipping address if you already know it? He already told
PayPal where he lives! In terms of user experience, a simple button is way
better than filling a form with many fields… and when it comes to shipping
there are at least three or four of them.
Another a great feature is that we are talking about a standard because the login with
PayPal tool is based on OpenID Connect which uses OpenID 2.0 and OAuth 2.0 open
standards.
Using
the PayPal tool also opens many new points of view for the
merchant/applications. If you think about it, PayPal actually has more than 100
million users. You are potentially expanding your user base. Everything also
comes with a real-time update of user data: if your user changes something
about himself on PayPal, your application will “know it” immediately.
I
presume that you now have really good reasons to start thinking about it. Let’s
see how to implement this solution in a sample application.
How does PayPal work?
Before
diving into the implementation procedure, it’s going to be a good thing if you
can understand the mechanism under the hood. Like we mentioned before, the Log
With PayPal login tool
is based on Open ID Connect. In the picture below, you can find all the
information about the entire procedure in every single moment.
Everything
starts with the application that we are developing: it could be the e-commerce
we used before as an example. The Log In with PayPal button redirects the user
to the Paypal login Authentication and Authorization Service. After giving
credentials, the user has to agree to share his data with our application. He
will be informed of every single datum that he’s going to share with us. If
everything goes fine, PayPal gives to the application an authorization code.
The
next step is a communication between the merchant (the application) and the
PayPal token service endpoint. The first gives to the second the authorization
code, in order to receive the access
token and the refresh
token.
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