Easiest way to sell stuff and track inventory.

Question

Hi, on my website I sell unique items. I have programmed it so that on the selling page, users can select any amount of these items, and it calculates the cost. The key is that I only have 1 of each of these items. So I need the shopping cart system to not allow the payment to go through unless it is available.

I've been searching for a good quick/easy/cheap solution and can't find one. I don't expect this site to make a lot of money (the transactions are a few bucks), so I didn't want to need a ssl certificate.

The only way I know of not needing an ssl certificate would be to use paypal or google checkout. However, I do not think there is a way of using these services and making paypal's server run a script to check how many are available on the site. Any solution?

Thanks

Answer 1

I was thinking about it more, and I think the problem is that once the user gets to the paypal payment screen, I have no control. I guess I could do something like they click the buy it now link, a php script updates it to sold, then they go to the paypal screen, but then they might not continue the purchase...

Answer 2

If you use PayPal Website Payments Standard (using a cart rather than 'Buy Now' Buttons) then you could use IPN or PDT (see the paypal docs here) to get PayPal to call back to you with the status of the payment.

The work flow would then be to set status to reserved when the item is added to the cart, and then wait for the IPN/PDT call to come back with the payment status, and mark the item as sold.

You would still need to check and reset to available any item that had been reserved for longer than say 2 Hours. (You could do this before serving a page to a user so that they have the latest availability and you don't need a cron job or long running process)