I heard from my partners in my dating business they wanted to add Paypal. Ok, sounded good. We have been way behind the times on this. So, when an email from Authorize.net came out saying they now were offering Paypal, I was asked to add this new service. I ended up spending hours reading through documents and using sample code.
After about 2 days and reading all these documents, and calling Authorize.net, I finally realized that they are not integrated, Paypal and Authorize.net are separate payment gateways. I had to contact Authorize.net to find out the only reason they are combined is for reporting purposes, so you can see all your orders in one space. This can be important for enterprise companies. It was totally confusing and convoluted, but I figured it out finally.
So, I set about getting Paypal to work. You would think that it would be easy. The reason we can not do a simple Paypal integration is we need to know if the order went through and update our database once the order has completed. Anyway, took me more than 3 days to figure most of it out. The documents are very difficult to understand. Even understanding the most basic concept behind why the two companies had anything to do with each other was confusing.
So theoretically when we get Paypal orders they will now show up in reporting in Authorize.net