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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T15:48:51+00:00

I have a website where users pay for a service provided by other users,

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I have a website where users pay for a service provided by other users, and in the end of the week we pay the users the value of the sale of their service minus our commission.

Currently when we want to pay our users, we do manual payments, logging into paypal and manually updating our database after payment. The problem we have is that our transactions are exceeding a thousand a week, so it gets VERY cumbersome to do it manually.

We came up with a little system where by using the Adaptive Payments API from paypal, we can execute payments and update our database with just one click.

My question is the following – We are afraid of a few circumstances occurring:

  1. We pay the user, our SQL database goes down, so we do not update our sale records. As a consequence, the system pays the user again when the cron executes.

  2. We could do the reverse, and update our SQL database first, and if that goes through, we execute the paypal payment. The problem with that is, if something goes wrong on the PayPal side, we end up not paying our users at all, since our database was updated as if we had paid them.

Our solutions:

  • We update our database and keep track of all the changed records – > proceed to call PayPal API – > If the PayPal call fails, we revert the changes to the updated records; If the call is successful, we leave it as it is.

  • We execute the PayPal payment, and update the database. We store the ACK message from the API in the database, and when we check our records to pay users, we verify if the ACK field is success.

Our solutions make us really weary, and perhaps we are trapped in a certain mindset. Our fear is that either or SQL will fail or PayPal api call won’t go through.
Does anyone have any suggestions or perhaps a completely different implementation for our payment system?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, basicly this is something for a transaction system(s).

    have a look here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/commit.html

    1. start transaction
    2. update user entry in database
    3. if update is success send payment to paypal
    4. sent a commit to database if it was successfull.

    This would be the savest approach, and if the commit fails, just log that error somewhere not DB relevant and handle that by hand afterwards (user friendly)

    Just a side note, it is of course financially more secure for you, to update the user data first that payment was sent and after this has run smoothly sending the payment to paypal.

    If you can’t rollback the user-data after payment went wrong its not to your damage but the user will for sure tell you he did not receive a payment….

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