Thanking donors in Flash after successful credit card payment.

Question

An example of what I'm talking about is on some political candidate websites, like BJ Lawson or Ron Paul's old site.

When you donate, it shows your name in Flash as a recent donor. It might also show a "goal" and how far along you are. Just curious if you can give me ideas on how to accomplish something similar, starting with how to accept credit cards in the first place.

I "think" I should use a 3rd party payment processor to avoid handling credit cards and the responsibility myself, like Paypal, but I'm not sure how my site (and the Recent Donor Flash app) would "know" that the payment was completed successfully.

Answer 1

The third party payment processor site will let you know the outcome of the payment processing. I think you need to do some basic research for this area, there are lots of third parties - all the way up to full merchant accounts, down to Paypal and Google Checkout.

Why do you need Flash to write someone's name and a progress meter?

Answer 2

As part of you post payment steps, normally you would be doing something like sending the order to your fulfillment team, record the donation.

The flash app will need to query your database, via a webpage that gives back the info in xml or json, or however you want to give the data to your flash app, for new donations to show every so often.