issuing login information upon receipt of purchase

Question

I am selling stuff from here:

http://foundationletters.com/buy-master-mind-products/

One of the things on sale is a subscription to a specific website.

As you can see, I have connected e-junkie to my authorize.net account.

Let's say that I already have pre-generated accounts. In other words, I have logins and passwords that I am selling. I need to be able to convey them one at a time to every person that buys the product.

How do I do this?

I am sorry for such an open ended question. I prefer to not do much PHP / MySQL programming. Perhaps I can just have the person download a program that will automatically connect to a remote txt file from which it will grab an account?

But still i would need a placeholder, I would need to know which accounts are taken and which are not?

Please help if you have e-commerce experience selling "information" rather than physical merchandise using ecommerce with authorize.net

Answer 1

I think if I understand your question correctly, you want to be able to give people access to information/data (in this case, login credentials) upon completion of a transfer of funds (a sale), correct?

This is similar to a software license activation model wherein software vendor sells a license to use their software, the purchaser is given access to use the software by way of an activation key, product code etc. When done via. the Web, typically the seller, upon verifying payment from the buyer, makes the information available on the resulting Web page (usually called a receipt page). This is where the seller displays the sensitive data to the buyer. Customarily, on this page the seller will include a message such as "please print for your records". Additionally, it's very useful to allow the buyer to visit the Ecommerce site again at a later point to re-access the purchased information (if by chance they lost it).

Since you are selling "accounts", what your software could do (after payment is verified):

1. Generate a new username/password combination and store the credentials in whatever system depends on them to authenticate the customer later.
2. Display the credentials on the resulting Web page for the customer.
3. (optionally) Create an association in your database between the new "credentials" record and the new "order" record (not sure of your db schema, but using these names in place of actual entity names).

Hope this helps!

-aj