Automated payment notification with php

Question

I'm about to integrate automated payments into a site.

To date, I've successfully used paypal for a number of projects, but these have always been sites which sell physical goods, meaning I can upload the cart contents, user pays, person physically ships goods.

This site is a one off payment to enable extra features on a web app. My current thinking is to go down the paypal IPN route to get a notification back and update the users account based on the successful payment.

Question is in two parts: 1 - is there a better / simpler way? (any payment processor considered) 2 - does anyone know of a code library or plug in for php which will speed up my integration?

Thanks for your help.

Rob

Answer 1

I remember coding the IPN handler myself; it was a really fun project, but it's not simple, it does take a while and since we are talking about money you want to be sure you get it right (even though PayPal offers a "testing" paypal website so you can easily see if it works).

Anyways, here is a good PHP IPN library; I took inspiration from it while coding my own.