First time building paypal ecommerce website - how to do it right?

Question

Hi guys, this may come as pretty odd but I'm now working on a membership based website where users sign up and choose mode of membership which would be on monthly, quarterly or yearly payment basis. Its going to be paypal based. However despite having worked 5 years I haven't ever working on any ecommerce project before :\ instead I've worked pretty much everything else i.e integrating wikipedia, built an email client, pdf parsing, etc etc and I'm a bit perplexed on how to start on this. I haven't done any online shopping before - I know the theory behind it using a third party for payments and all but I don't know how should I structure my system.

Like we have 3 users , free users, premium and gold users. Free users have minimal access, gold users have maximum access and premium users have.. somewhat in between and thus they are charged accordingly. I was thinking like how do such websites work I mean lets say a user signs up for a gold account and pays for 3 months. What happens at the end of the three months are memberships sites such that they automatically bill the individual after every time period or would the individual be prompted upon nearing the end of his membership to pay up? And what information would I need to store in this case with respect to the transactions and all.

Plus how can I test this system without having to use a real time credit card or so :\ - sorry if I sound like a noob here but never had the chance to work on such a project before. Its never too late to learn.

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I've decided that the membership would be kinda simple in this aspect that - the users would upon signing up be given a free account and would be allowed to upgrade their accounts for a set period the expiration of which they would be reset back to their basic accounts unless they choose to renew with a paid subscription. The issue now is that - I have absolutely no idea of how to get this to work and I would not be using periodic billing.

Does it make any difference whether I use paypal, 2checkout or google check out or is the underlying methodology the same for all?

Answer 1

Paypal has a sandbox environment for development and testing purposes. Sign up here - https://developer.paypal.com. It works exactly like live PayPal and very easy to use.

What type of PayPal account are you going to use? If the Standard one then you won't be able to use any advanced API and will be provided only with a form with hidden elements like "amount" or "email". This form you put on your site and clients will be redirected to PayPal to make payments. If you want to get a notification from PayPal with transaction details you have to enable IPN posts. This can be done in the PayPal account settings. IPN post will execute your script at the URL you should specify.

Let me know if you need any examples.

I am not sure how to automatically bill the client. Please check with API - https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/library_documentation.

Answer 2

Looking at your tags, you mention PHP. OSCommerce would be a good place to start for you as you could then see a Administration Site, Front end facing customer site. Then you have the code, the documentation, payment gateway integrations etc...

From here you could use as a template for a more custom and smaller system, or use OSCommerce and create extra modules for it.

Andrew

http://www.oscommerce.com/