Paypal Question

[cancer10]

Hi,

I am trying to make a shopping cart using paypal payment gateway.

Here is a scenario:

A customer visits my site, adds an item to the cart, clicks on the "checkout" button, he is then redirected to the paypal payment page, now would could I track if he has payed for the item?


Thanx

[rafiki]

seriously why did anyone invent the search function?

[cancer10]

It never helped me

[Fumigator]

The paypal website has step by step instructions for doing what you're asking about.

[TheShaner]

Look up IPN (Instant Payment Notification).

-Shane

[ghell]

There is also a paypal developer section (developer.paypal.com) with forum (paypaldev.org) and a sandbox. The forum doesn't work for me though (the CAPTCHAs always say invalid no matter how many times I enter them) so I don't know if it is broken or what.

You can also use the features like express checkout so that the payment is directly on your site and the buyer never leaves, in which case I don't think you need IPN. IPN is generally how it's done though (it's how I do it anyway).

There are a lot of tutorials around the web for IPN.

[graham08]

Surely you would be able to track if they have paid for the item by checking your paypal account and checking the amount paid. Of course you could get your site to send a message/e-mail out at the same time displaying user details so that they match with what they purchased. But I'm sure the paypal website has more details on this subject.

[Fumigator]

Surely you would be able to track if they have paid for the item by checking your paypal account and checking the amount paid

The idea is to automate things, so no human intervention is needed. IPN is perfect for just such a thing. Your customer leaves your site to go pay via Paypal, so you can't know if the customer really did pay unless you use IPN (or go to the Paypal website as you've mentioned, which would be a massive pain in the butt).

[ghell]

You can manually go and check. IPN is the automated solution.

Here's the gist of IPN:
Whenever a payment is processed, a PayPal server sends a http request to your server, you verify that it is real by sending another request to their server, handle any other security checks that you want like checking that it has a unique transaction id and checking that it is a payment not a chargeback or refund or whatever, then do whatever you want with it inside your page handler once you know that it is valid (send out an email confirming it, add a record to a database, log it, etc)

[lashley]

Hi,

Use Dlguard.com it's what you need. It tracks who bought, and has a lot more features not just selling through paypal...

You can sell through clickbank, create coupons, secure your product by creating license codes and protecting your download links (they expire after specific time)... great!

Karl