Best practice for online payments

[amax]

Hi All, I would really love some advice on the best practice used to structure an online booking form before firing off to a payment provider.

At present, I have worked out the total price of goods, good attribures, customer details etc etc and presented the user with a confirmation page in the usual way. All the form fields are hidden thats needed to post to the payment providers action URL.

However, should I save all these details in an order table here, setting an "orderComplete" flag to 0 before posting to the payment provider. I was thinking this would be the best thing to do as if a connection was dropped on the response back from the payment provider (as has happened in the past), all the details would still be available in the database for retrival. If the payment is then sucessful, I was going to update the "OrderComplete" flag to a 1

Im really not sure on what is the most reliable / standard way of doing this though.

[johanafm]

Yes, you should save the data as soon as possible. This is always the most reliable. I'd also recommend you use a datetime for "paid", rather than an "order_complete" flag, since the datetime serves the same purpose as well as carries information about when it happened.