Updating a successful payment from Paypal

[donovanh]

Hi,

I'm thinking of using paypal as a means to pay for an online product such as an ebook. However, as the site is to offer commissions to agents that promote the book, a successful payment would have to update a field in the database for that agent. Is there a way to do this using the paypal system?

Thanks,

Don

[weekender]

If you go into Paypal, click on Merchant Services, and look for Instant Payment Notification (or IPN) you can download a manual all about this.

How it works in brief... Someone makes a paypal payment from your site, paypal recieves the payment and calls a URL you specify on your server. Paypal passes the variables to your URL (ie script) and you can then add these details to a database, etc.