Websites for collecting custom online payments

I need to create a method of collecting payments online (credit card at a minimum, debit and ACH if possible) for registration for a one-time event. It needs to collect payment, but also collect several pieces of information that don’t require payment, e.g. name of registrant (which may not match the name on the card), as well as optional payments. on top of the mandatory one. It would then need to be in a format that I can put on a website, either with a link or custom buttons.

I would prefer cheap as possible, but not opposed to standard credit card fees.

The best way I have found so far is to use a free PayPal Business account, and create several shopping cart buttons and paste the resulting HTML to our website. However, they seem to only limit you to up to 3 options per checkout button: a dropdown with prices (where $0 is not allowed), a dropdown with no prices, and a short answer fill in section. So if I want 2 dropdowns with prices, I have to create multiple sections. This might be doable with multiple “Add to Cart” sections, but then it’s isn’t elegant, and might lead to users skipping options because it’s confusing. I want to limit users going too far off of a scripted process, and “Add to Cart” does have the limitation of not making sure that they don’t add 2x the same item or skipping an item.

Other things I’ve looked at are Amazon Payments (I hate Seller Central so I wanted to avoid that) and Google Pay, which doesn’t seem to support this.

Also, while we aren’t opposed to combing through invoices to tabulate how many people picked options A vs. B, if there is some automated thing (export to .csv or something), that would be helpful to.

Bump. Anyone use PayPal for payments?

I’ve used PayPal for payments for numerous things. I’m also a Web developer and to be honest, what you seem to need is a customized shopping cart. You can still use PayPal for the payment processor but if you really need it to work a specific way, you might just have to shell out for someone to develop this for you.

How many people are you talking about? If not a lot it would be better to just collect the information manually (for example email) rather than a complicated cart.

Here is what I used to use for a free shopping cart (with payment by Paypal in my case):
https://www.mals-e.com/

About 200 people. And then it will likely not be used again.

Also is there any way to preview how the transaction will look from the user’s standpoint? I’m looking at PayPal’s sandboxing mode, but can’t make much sense of it. Right now I’m hosting the layout on a stub page.

Thanks for the link, I’ll look at that for ideas.