I posted awhile back about the most preferred methods of accepting payments and after doing research and sandboxing several services, PayPal seems to be the easiest to implement however as I am new to eCommerce I shelf my guess work and ask the following of my intended situation.
Scenario
I process all user registrations locally and use the visitors e-mail address as their username. The e-mail address and their password are stored locally in MySQL. But this e-mail MAY not be the same as any paypal account address they already have.
Users can opt to upgrade their membership to a monthly subscription at $x / month. After completing subscription registration via PayPal they should be returned to my page to login and see their newly accessible content.
Desired Process
User registers for subscription and the processing is done through Paypal.
The IPN sends back the information needed and hopefully the Subscription ID.
The Subscription ID will be inserted into my MySQL database in the relevant row for the user.
Each time the subscription is charged successfully the IPN should send the notification to my script that updates the "last_billed_on" on field.
If the charge fails, the script will update the "is_current" field to 0 and the user will be notified at login that their CC was not charged and the paid-for material becomes no longer accessible until the charge is successful.
I've done some googling throughout the day and haven't found any solid examples but rather people asking similar questions. Does anyone have experience with this method? Is it even possible? Can I or do I need to send some user-specific data in the PayPal communication form that identifies the user so the return from PayPal can properly update the right record?
Thanks all.