Paypal?

latemodern

Hi,

I am looking for a system to sell single items at the touch of a button, but want to be able to offer discounts depending on what the user has bought before. I have had a look at paypal but cannot seem to get an answer from them on how I would be notified when someone has bought something and what that something is. Does anybody know how to achieve this with paypal or perhaps an alternative?

This is how I plan to implement:

1) Get a buy now button in html code for each course

2) Store the html for each course with each course's record in the database and display appropriate courses by querying the database. Easy enough

3) Courses that have a discount option will be treated as a new course as far as the database is concerned

4) When a user clicks on 'Buy now' it takes them through to pay pal who will handle the transaction (I assume they have the price already so all I will need to pass them is a course ID)

5) If the user goes through with the transaction they will be returned to my site.

6) Once back at the site I need to record whether they went through with the transaction or not.

Its step 6 that I can't work out how to do or even if its possible. I would have assumed that Paypal have thought about this before and have an xml messaging system or something

Any ideas?

ManWithNoName

You seem to be asking three questions here:
a) how to create a discount system
b) how to create a notification system
c) how to track your buyers

No?

I can not give a straight answer to any of those question, it feels that it all depends on how you have created/will create your system. But I would guess that c) would involve sessions.

You made me curios about PayPal and PHP, so I Googled and found http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/77 have you seen it?

latemodern

Thanks a lot for that link. I had found some stuff about it but it looked a bit frightening and I am using shared hosting so can't install anything. Although this looks a bit more promising.

Sorry if I was unclear. I am fine setting up everything until the transaction. The only thing I am unsure of is how to record when someone has bought something. However, I've just been told that there is a notification URL setting with paypal. I shall investigate that before getting into a tangle with the API

Thanks again!

inotgood

try this,

Before the buyer make a purchase give the buyer a form that require just the email from the buyer before making the purchase. For example the form should prompt the buyer with the message "If you made a purchase before, enter your email for a discount. If you never made a purchase before, enter your email for future discount." If the email is in the database then you can do some php code to give a discount.

AndyMoore

First off the PayPal API doesn't require you to install anything, it's a collection of PHP scripts (or whatever scripting language you prefer) you just upload which then make connections to PayPal on your behalf, to use the API you need to be a verified business customer I think.

As for the comment where it appears you think PayPal should hold your course info already, no they do not hold any details like that and do not act as a shopping cart in that way, just a payment processor. Yes they store historical data relating to your orders but will only charge a client what you tell them to charge.

With regards to the notification URL this is IPN PayPal's Instant Payment Notification - when you make a sale, or something happens to one of your transactions like a reversal or refund, you get a HTTP request come in with the order data, things like client name, address, email, what they bought and so on.

There's one or two IPN testing tools out there to help you on the way.