PayPal Making a Credit Card Payment (Node) Making a Payment with a Vaulted Credit Card (Node)

Example

In this example, we'll be looking at how to store a credit card using the PayPal vault, then reference that stored credit card to process a credit card transaction for a user.

The reason why we would want to use the vault is so that we don't have to store sensitive credit card information on our own servers. We simply reference the payment method via a provided vault ID, meaning that we don't have to deal with many PCI compliance regulations with storing the credit cards ourselves.

As with previous samples, we start with setting up our environment.

var paypal = require('paypal-rest-sdk'),
    uuid = require('node-uuid');

var client_id = 'YOUR CLIENT ID';
var secret = 'YOUR SECRET';

paypal.configure({
  'mode': 'sandbox', //sandbox or live
  'client_id': client_id,
  'client_secret': secret
});

The one difference to previous samples here is that we are requiring a new package, node-uuid, which is to be used to generate unique UUID's for the payers when storing the card. You can install that package via:

npm install node-uuid

Next, we define the credit card JSON object that will be sent to the PayPal vault for storage. It contains information from the card, as well as a unique payer ID that we generate using node-uuid. You should store this unique payer_id in your own database as it will be used when creating a payment with the vaulted card.

var create_card_details = {
    "type": "visa",
    "number": "4417119669820331",
    "expire_month": "11",
    "expire_year": "2018",
    "first_name": "John",
    "last_name": "Doe",
    "payer_id": uuid.v4()
};

Lastly, we need to store the credit card and process the payment using that card. To vault a credit card, we call credit_card.create(...), passing in the credit_card_details object that we just created. If all goes well, we should have an object returned to us with details about the vaulted card. For the sake of a payment with that card, we only really need two pieces of information: the payer_id that we already stored, and the vault ID, that should also be stored as a reference in our own database.

paypal.credit_card.create(create_card_details, function(error, credit_card){
    if(error){
        console.error(error);
    } else {
        var card_data = {
            "intent": "sale",
            "payer": {
                "payment_method": "credit_card",
                "funding_instruments": [{
                    "credit_card_token": {
                        "credit_card_id": credit_card.id,
                        "payer_id": credit_card.payer_id
                    }
                }]
            },
            "transactions": [{
                "amount": {
                    "total": "7.47",
                    "currency": "USD",
                    "details": {
                        "subtotal": "7.41",
                        "tax": "0.03",
                        "shipping": "0.03"
                    }
                },
                "description": "This is the payment transaction description." 
            }]
        };
        
        paypal.payment.create(card_data, function(error, payment){
            if(error){
                console.error(error);
            } else {
                console.log(JSON.stringify(payment));
            }
        });
    }
});

In the section following the successful vaulting of the credit card, we are simply defining the card details and processing the payment, as we did with the previous credit card processing example. The main difference in the structure of the card_data object is the funding_instruments section, that we define under payer. Instead of defining the credit card information, we instead use the following object that contains the vault ID reference, and the payer ID:

"credit_card_token": {
    "credit_card_id": credit_card.id,
    "payer_id": credit_card.payer_id
}

That is how we use a vaulted card to process a payment.