How does PayPal work?

PayPal is a great way for your customers to have peace of mind when making payments to you. The main reason for this "comfort" is that your customer doesn't use your web site to make the payment. Instead they are transferred by MyCourts to PayPal's own web site and all the actual processing is made by PayPal on their computers. PayPal will return the customer to your web site when they click the "Return to MyCourts" button.

Here's what happens in practice...

1. The customer selects their booking on MyCourts web site.
2. The customer selects to pay via PayPal.
3. MyCourts opens a new popup window which takes them to PayPal. The MyCourts browser window remains on-screen but is made inactive until the PayPal transaction (and hence the popup browser window) is closed.
4. The customer pays using PayPal and the customer is advised of success or otherwise by PayPal. They are then either required to close the PayPal browser window or if paid closes automatically. In the background, PayPal advises MyCourts whether payment was successful or unsuccessful.
5. MyCourts responds to the PayPal advice and if PayPal was unsuccessful, gives your hirer a chance to select another payment method and then records the booking or erases it depending on whether payment was successful or not.
6. If MyCourts doesn't get a response from PayPal mentioned at 4 above after several minutes of inactivity, then MyCourts assumes that PayPal payment failed for one reason or another and cancels the booking.

To avoid customer confusion, MyCourts will send emails to your customer advising them if the booking was cancelled due to a "time out". MyCourts also send emails confirming all successful bookings. It is therefore imperative that your email settings are correct and that your customers are not "blocking" emails as spam from whatever "From" address you have configured in MyCourts setup.