Sell digital downloads with PayPal ....
PHP-IPNMonitor is a PHP / mySQL application for selling digital downloads (such as software programs, mp3 files, graphics, icons, photos, ring tones, ebooks, videos) from your web site. It can also sell physical (tangible) products as well.
The application provides the checking of the completed transaction from PayPal, secure downloading of digital goods, the sending of confirmation emails, and a shopping cart to display the items.
The customer does not have to have a PayPal account to purchase an item but can use any Credit Card supported by PayPal. PayPal then becomes just a payment gateway for the credit card.
Main features
- Interacts with Paypal's IPN system to monitor when a payment is complete for both digital and physical products.
- Automatically generates an email with a unique password which the customer uses to log in to download their digital purchases.
- The purchaser has a defined time limit to download their files and has a defined number of retries.
- Files are not accessible via a normal href link and hence cannot be downloaded by unauthorized users.
- The dynamic shopping cart is instantly updated by changes that you make in the admin section.
- Physical and digital items may be added to the cart at the same time.
- Shipping calculations (flat rate or percentage based) can be added to physical goods.
- You may place buttons by hand onto existing web pages, or use the template driven shopping store.
- Includes a test page to check the basic operation of the scripts.
- Incorporates testing via the PayPal Sandbox test environment so that the complete system, including IPN can be tested.
- Includes a facility to send items to multiple customers which may be used for upgrading software or complementary sells.
- Written in PHP and requires mySQL.
- All credit card transactions are handled by PayPal.
Displaying your buttons
Products are viewed depending on how you want the buy now buttons to integrate into your web site.
- Hand constructed sites : You can create buttons by hand which may be placed anywhere on to existing web pages. You may add 'buy now buttons' or 'add to cart' buttons and in the case of 'add to cart' buttons you can also add in a shopping cart display. The technique makes it easy to add the dynamically created data into existing web pages.
- Dynamic shopping store : You can use the shopping store which is a complete application that automatically displays the products by category / subcategory extracting the data from the database so that any changes you make to an item, such as price etc will instantly appear on your web site. The shopping store system is entirely template driven using 'patTemplate' which means that changing the look of the pages can be easily achieved by modifying HTML pages.
Customer login
The customer logs into this page to download their files.
Installation and requirements
- PHP version PHP 4.1.0 or higher (including PHP5)
- Apache web server
- mySQL database version 3.23 or higher
- Recommended Linux or FreeBSD operating system but will work on Windows operating system
- A Paypal Business or Premium account - sign up here.
- Email functionality on the web server so that the PHP scripts can send out emails to customers.
- If you are looking for a suitable host for you site, I would recommend the basic web hosting plan from LunarPages which has all the required features for this application.
It uses only 'standard' php, does not require any extra php modules, it should not need any changes to the .ini file and it requires only minor modifications to file folder permissions.
Flow Chart
