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I’m setting up a PayPal button to sell my e-book on my website, but one tiny problem. During the process, you have to provide a thank you page and specific download link for the PDF file.
Instead of changing it myself, is there a way to make it automatic and random every time a new customer buys? A script perhaps?
But then the thank you page would be the same, which wouldn’t work… so I don’t know.
Can anyone give me suggestions on how to approach this matter, please?
Thanks.
Usually the way this is done is when a purchase is completed successfully, a server script coins a unique download ID (usually some long sequence of randomly generated digits), associates it with the person who bought it, stores that info in a database and then puts it in a download link and sends it to the buyer – either in a returned web page or in an email.
The buyer can then click on that link which will take the buyer to your server. The server looks up the unique download ID that is in the URL, checks the database, decides if it’s still a legitimate download ID and, if it is, it returns that actual download file to the browser with the right content-type so that the browser does the right thing with the returned data.
Your server can then decide how long it wants to keep that download ID as valid. It can be only for 1-3 uses (allowing for the fact that the legitimate person downloading may have had a glitch and had to redownload it), it can be for only a certain amount of time from purchase or from first download or any other algorithm that you thinks suits your business needs. You can age out old, expired records from the DB either with a chron job or in some regular housekeeping function you call.
Sorry, but I do not know enough about the back-end integration options in PayPal to know how to integrate this into PayPal, but this is the general workflow you probably want. If PayPal generates a unique transaction ID that is random enough for your needs, you might even be able to use that in your URL and database.