Simple eCommerce

[~J~]

I have a product that I shall be selling online soon and want the general jist to be something like this:

Customer clicks "Buy Now"
Customer enters CreditCard/PayPal details.
Payment "IS" confirmed.
Customer Enters a name/email address
Customer receives activation key (on screen or email or both)
Customer can activate previously downloaded 'demo' with key.

Now how easy is this to do?

I have a site which is NOT a Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS kinda affair, and my knowledge of PHP isn't that great.

What bothers me the most are 2 things:

How can I 'test' the process of sending a payment? Do I have to ensure there is, say, £9.99 in my PayPal account and just keep sending and crediting that to make sure the other stuff works?

Likewise regarding the activation key; is there something out there can generate a key based on a phrase or something but it also pretty secure? I don't want some kind of equation-based code generator if it can be easily cracked. Something like a MD5 or the like would be ideal.

Anyone have any good pointers?

 

[~J~]

OK, well will look into the first part a bit more.

As for the second part, sounds interesting but I just wanna clarify a few things.

Are you saying then that:

Customer call Bob enters his email as [email protected]. My site generates an activation code, say, A1B2C3D4E5 and emails it to them. What I want is if they enter [email protected] AND A1B2C3D4E5 into my program, it verifies as ok because the activation code is based on the email address. Is that what would happen? (Obviously I'd need to code in the decryption on my program but that's easy).

 

[~J~]

Nope that's great, I think I understand it now, not as bad as I thought it might be.

It's the "Payment made" to "Give activation key" that has be baffled as obviously I don't want someone making a payment of 0.01p and getting an activation code. Likewise I don't want the option of "Buy Now" and the customer having to wait for me to check payment and manually work out a key and email it to them. I just want it all automatic, secure, reliable and fast.

But that's been a big help, thanks for that.

 

[~J~]

Yes, you can use something called Instant Payment Notification from Paypal to POST back to an address on your site details such as amount paid, transaction number etc etc

That's VERY interesting!

HAd a quick look at the PayPal and it doesn't seem to answer a question that I have:

At the moment, transaction to and from my PayPal will say "Jason Hirst".

If I want to hide my name and put my company one instead, can that be done or do I have to set up a brand new PayPal account. If the latter, will it cause confusion if the bank account details are the same?