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Hi:

I have the paypal form working pretty well. I basically use the onsubmit after email code discussed extensively in this forum. My problem is that the user data is stored before verification of payment. Therefore a user could potentially go to the paypal window and close their browser w/o paying , but still be recorded in the database on the site as paid. I'm probably anwsering my own question here , but I guess the only way to verify payment would be to grab the post parameters back when the paypal processing is finished and stuff them in the db at that point.

Since I have not worked w/paypal--do these parameters still exist on the redirect from paypal?
Is the best way just to manually reconcile the data between the seller's paypal and the DB on the site? Seems fine for small things , but a bit error prone for large amounts of data.

Thanks

Hi wrw28,

I'm afraid there's no simple answer to this.

PayPal does provide a feedback service called IPN (Instant Payment Notification) which uses a $_POST dialogue. IIRC they post to your site and you are required to post back to PayPal as a kind of hand-shake. I don't think that IPN is particularly difficult to set up - there is full documentation from PayPal and plenty of IPN scripts that you can look at - but I haven't had to do it yet (though maybe in the next week or so).

You *should* use IPN if you want to automate payment checking and/or if you are selling product and need confirmation before shipping. If you are selling a service that you can easily cancel if the payment doesn't go through, or taking donations then IPN probably isn't important.

Bob

PS I think PayPal may offer other confirmation methods in some packages - IPN is the common basic one.