Recently we were asked to come up with the most cost effective way to create a registration form with a online payment functionality. Short of actually creating a new site and building in a registration form with some existing plugin functionality, it seemed to be quite a challenge. There is of course the great online form tool provided as a free service in the Google Drive suite of tools. It is a neat implementation, allowing for the form fields to be collected into an online spreasheet and the only requirement being a gmail account. However, how do we go about integrating a payment gateway? As easy as google forms can be they are notoriously difficult to extend their functionality.
However, we came across a neat service provided by CrazyChro.me, whereby enabling a google form to be re-hosted by this service and in effect redirected first to a PayPal account for a fixed payment amount and some neat extra fields to be added in the process. You can see a demo in the above link, with some neat additional service that are currently not provided by Google forms such as the ability to upload an image/document which is again hosted on the remote server and provided as a link in the Google spreadsheet.
Last but not least, you can track your payment Invoice-ID by adding an extra field ‘paypal invoice’ to your form which is hidden for your visitors.