[web] how to allow downloads following payment
Author
I was thinking of allowing downloads from my website. My html skills are limited ! So I was thinking about using paypal/other 3rd party to handle payments. So a few hopefully simple questions:
1)How do I allow only people who have paid to have access to download a game ?
2)How can I automate the above so that after they've paid they automatically have access to download the game ? I mean I think it's expecting too much for them to wait for a few days while I work out whether the money has cleared or not ?
cheers
Require the user to have an account and then set some sort of flag in their account to show that they've purchased certain games.
HTH!
HTH!
Quote:Original post by Programmer16
Require the user to have an account and then set some sort of flag in their account to show that they've purchased certain games.
ish. you could attach it to the session also. But the real trick & the only part I don't know how to do is that you have to protect the file as well. Otherwise people could just trade the link around to the actual file location and just rip it from you. What you also need is a way to protect the actual file location on your server to only be accessible to the flagged users.
For convenience you may also want to allow guest accounts to have access to the file. Again the front end is pretty simple though likely above your "my html skills are limited" level.
Frontend:
PHP or JSP/Java or (insert web scripting language here)
database
at least 3 tables ( user, session, StuffUserOwns )
flow:
user logs in or fills cart
user pays
verify payment
insert new row into StuffUserOwns (userid, itemid)
give user link to file
<part i don't know how to do>: make file acessible to user based on StuffUserOwns
???
Profit
-me
Paypal and google checkout (and the others for that matter) have script-based methods to notify you if a transaction has happened. They'll notify your site of a payment (generally from your shopping cart), then you write code to verify the transaction, send the download link, etc.
Paypal's version is called IPN, and there's pretty extensive sample code and a user community. Ditto for Google Checkout.
Paypal's version is called IPN, and there's pretty extensive sample code and a user community. Ditto for Google Checkout.
One problem with that is that people can still trade the downloaded file around. So you might want to think of watermarking or serial keys or something.
I have use Yahoo stores in the past, they allow you to setup a web page, store, shopping cart, and allow people to pay for downloads. Obviously your going to have to protect against people from swapping the install files with serial keys and such, but its a really good method.
www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com
www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com
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