I’m designing a database system, which sells courses to students. This is all done within PHP. I want to take Paypal payments on my website and having done some research I need IPN.
I’ve been reading docs/guides on how to achieve this from http://www.x.com but its quite confusing to find info I need as there seems to be more than one way of doing something. The IPN stuff looks pretty straight forward, paypal just needs the unique Invoice number, which the notify script uses to retrieve the record and post the appropriate response into a database and if all goes well, redirect page to a thank you.
The thing is which method do I initially send my values across to Paypal, I don’t really want to pass on quantity and shipping data as all of these pieces of data are irrelevant I don’t want my end user to see. Do I have to start looking at using the paypal api?
Thanks for the advice
Since your question seems to be “where should i start looking for a good paypal integration with php” i’ll give you some general “advice”. I had the same problem just a couple of months ago.
Yes you’ve to read paypal docs, and unfortunatly they don’t have the gift of clarity.. very complete but i didn’t find them very clear.
However this php class has been very helpful for my similar project: https://github.com/Quixotix/PHP-PayPal-IPN hope can help you too.
Also these articles/classes/docs has been helpful (but at the end i’m not using them) to clear my mind about PP integration:
http://drewjoh.com/wiki/code/classes/phppaypal
http://www.geekality.net/2011/05/28/php-tutorial-paypal-instant-payment-notification-ipn/