Now you can set up a virtual world store and start earning real world money! Adam Frisby's gang did what was inevitable - Opensim integration to Paypal.
WARNING:
What is being described below is dealing in real currency - you
owe it to yourself if you plan to use this, to understand how it
works, and perform your own risk assessment. The module is
completely unsupported and unwarrantied. Use it at your own
risk.
Suppose you are a user of one of the Open Grids or Hypergrid
system - and you want to purchase an item, pay into an object, or
otherwise transact business where a real currency transfer occurs
somewhere down the line. Up until now, in all environments you are
reliant on trusting a third party to act as a middleman, providing
some currency-equivilent (such as say V$, L$ or whatever.).
The problems with this scenario is that that currency is at best
backed by a single corporate entity (and even then they may not
choose to 'back' it at all) - leaving you exposed in the event
something goes wrong. This is compounded by the general trading
size of these operators - tending to be sole-traders or
small-business; the best scenario is one where neither the user nor
the merchant needs to rely on a third party beyond the credit card
processor.
Which is where DTL-PayPal comes in, this is a free (3-Clause
BSD), open source module we've developed to solve this explicit
problem. It uses PayPal as the backend for the transaction, and
prices inworld goods in US cents. You pay me, OS$100 - and you get
a bill for US$1.00 from PayPal. Every transaction needs to be
confirmed by you with PayPal thus adding security into the system;
in addition you don't need to carry existing balances of 'currency'
in order to buy items - each item can be bought individually with a
seperate transaction on your Credit Card for each purchase.
The transaction is a 2 step process for the user - which is
illustrated in the diagram below. Step one, you 'negotiate' the
payment size - this is basically filling out the payment or 'buy'
dialog that the vendor or merchant has setup already. Step two is
you will be asked to visit a special webpage (which links to one at
PayPal) which sets up and pays the transaction. From a users
perspective you need to do nothing more.
Steps 3 and 4 occur when PayPal has confirmed the transaction
for you - once the payment is confirmed (usually within 10
seconds), PayPal notifies the module, which in turn completes the
transaction, finally PayPal deposits the balance in the vendors
account for immediate use.
Obviously the problems with inventory server issues, vendor
malfunctions, etc still exist - but to a customer PayPal does allow
you to dispute charges on non-delivery grounds (however beware
doing this to scam the system - the merchant gets a chance at
rebuttal and it can be a complicated process)
From a vendor perspective - the main drawback to this solution
is cost, PayPal will charge you roughly $0.28 plus 2.2% for a
standard account in order to process the transaction. On tiny
transactions (such as one for $0.50, fee would be $0.31) this can
add up to a significant portion of the transaction. For users using
this exclusively, I highly recommend using a PayPal
MicroTransactions account which has much lower fees (but
certain additional terms & conditions).
So, where can I get the code for this? It's on my personal
GitHub account (along with a few of my other goodies) - http://github.com/AdamFrisby/DTL-PayPal
- I will add some further notes, first this module is currently
somewhat hard coded to present a warning to the user about it's
experimental nature, remove this at your own risk. Second - OpenSim
is still alpha software, you may run into other issues, so be
prepared to handle them if you want to accept payments from users
in it. This software has only been tested on the PayPal sandbox so
far (and I recommend you do the same), however should work with the
live version fine.
Enjoy.
Maxping says ...
Congratulations! This is a big step forward for open source
virtual worlds. I did already expect to see this earlier this year,
it is so very much needed enhancement for the system. Let the new
gold rush begin!
snowcrashme
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