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n4ows

I have a client who is a photographer and wants to sell his prints online. He went through one of these site developers who has not listened to his needs or provided what he wants. He went through 5 developers before he ended up with me.

Anyway, what they set him up with was PayPal and that only. What he wants is to be able to take orders online without the buyer having to have a PayPal account. He does already have a merchant account with BOA, so that much is done.

What I want to know is what all do I need to have to be able to set his site up to sell online without going through PayPal. I need all the separate components (merchant acct, shopping cart, ssl, etc...) and how they all fit together.

I know PHP and MySQL, but am pretty rusty at Perl and barely know any ASP, so an open source PHP/MySQL would be the best solution.

Thanks in advance for all your help and advice,
Alisa

dagon

you don't need a paypal account to buy from a merchant using it, any credit card will do.

rulian

Any transaction that uses paypal without using an API needs to be done at paypals site so you wouldnt handle the processing in that case.

n4ows

I need some elaboration on this. Once the purchase has been made, I need emails going to the buyer AND to the photo lab. If it's all handled in PayPal, and information is not passed back to my site, is there any way to handle that?

dagon

paypal will hit any url you give them after the transaction, you can use that to do any post purchasing processing you need to.

I'm not a pay pal evangelist, theirs plenty of other options but i have set up a dozen sites that use paypal.

The paypal docs are quite user friendly :-)

n4ows

Okay, so I'm still okay, I think. I send the email to the photo lab from the thankyou page after the order is completed. I'm not a big fan of paypal, but for now, until he knows what kind of traffic he's going to have, this will work. At a later date, we may look at other options. If it's okay, I'd like to contact you and hear what you like and why.