One of the best systems to sell over the internet is without any doubts PayPal. What many people don't know is that you can fully automate your PayPal sales with a very simple PHP script. You can for example send a customized message back to the customer with info about its purchase, create and send invoices, log the transactions to create the reports you really need, redirect the customer to any place so he can get the digital goods he has purchased from you or even generate software user licenses and send them inside an outstanding e-mail template. It is really amazing, you don't need to handle all those annoying PayPal notifications anymore.
That automatization is called IPN which stands for Instant Payment Notification. It is a feature you have to activate in your PayPal account, from the 'Profile | Instant Payment Notification' Preferences. Once done, each time a payment is done PayPal will run the PHP script hosted on your site. Due to the nature of the PHP language almost everything can be done with it.
We have ourselves automated our PayPal sales that way very successfully, actually PayPal IPN works better and gives us much more control than any other systems available on the internet. And best of all, PayPal processing fees are quite low comparing to others and get even lower depending on your sales volume so you can save 8% or more in fees per year.
All the information is available here.
That automatization is called IPN which stands for Instant Payment Notification. It is a feature you have to activate in your PayPal account, from the 'Profile | Instant Payment Notification' Preferences. Once done, each time a payment is done PayPal will run the PHP script hosted on your site. Due to the nature of the PHP language almost everything can be done with it.
We have ourselves automated our PayPal sales that way very successfully, actually PayPal IPN works better and gives us much more control than any other systems available on the internet. And best of all, PayPal processing fees are quite low comparing to others and get even lower depending on your sales volume so you can save 8% or more in fees per year.
All the information is available here.