Recently, I have been working on a project for a client of mine connecting to REST APIs of PayPal. I must say that PayPal APIs are not the most developer-friendly and comfortable to work with. I encountered hiccups in webhook configuration, since there are multiple generations of them (“Webhooks”/IPN/PDT) and the documentation is lacking in clarity. Through trial-and-error somehow I found the right configuration. Then I came across a feature (a bug) in the transaction search API, that the payments only appear in the search results several hours after their execution.

There’s a reason, why many people looking for a payment provider, which is easy to integrate, choose Stripe. While Stripe offers an amazing official Go library, Go developer support on the PayPal side is weak. The only help comes from a community-made client for PayPal REST APIs.

My contribution to improve the PayPal client is a pull request with new transaction search method, which got merged in version v3.0.18. To anybody making a decision to about a payment provider, as long as it’s an option, I recommend to use Stripe.

Tags: Go, paypal, REST, stripe.