Hi there,

I am planning on setting up a small hosting business. As I don't have the resources to invest in a costly billing system such as ModernBill yet, I have been looking at writing a very simple billing script of my own.

Basically I want to record the customer's details in a database, send them to the PayPal payment page, then have them sent back to my site so I can record their payment number and view the status of their payment.

I have looked at scripts with do this sort of thing, but they all seem so complex. I know how to put normal details in a database and then recall them but I am not sure how to associate a payment with a user's order so I can easily see, say by logging into a basic admin panel, whether their payment was successful or not. I want to do this with PHP and mySQL.

Any help would be very much appreciated.
Thank you :)

I created something like this for someone a while back. I ended up using an email pipe to get the transaction ID, amount and email address from an email account with PHP.

May not be the ideal way to do it but it worked fine for me

paypal ipn will send back the details in an array.. whether it was successfull or not, the trans id etc.. all you do is on the page that paypal sends the data back (you specify that aswell) have a dbase query to update that field, and input the status of the transaction, the transaction id, how much and when it happened..

if you go on paypal and read the documentation on the IPN it's quite simple.. they also have example scripts last time I checked.

i strongly advise if you don't know what you're doing, and don't see yourself learning it easily.. to get someone with experience to do it.. because you can get seriously screwed over if you don't do it right.

Paypal also has a sandbox on their developer site that you should use when testing your IPN implementation. Make sure to do that.

You might also find the forums at http://www.paypaldev.com/ useful.

Thanks for all your help everyone. Now I have an idea of what direction I am heading in :)

Is paypaldev.com offical forum of paypal?

Don't think so... ;)

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