Hi All,<br /><br />On my website I want to sell a number of different items, but I only have one of each. I will use Paypal to sell the items. What I want to know is when I user selects an item and pays for it via paypal how do I automatically stop any other users from trying to buy the same item again.<br /><br />what i would like is once the user goes through paypal and sends the payment to me the item they bought will lock or not allow you to click on 'Buy Now' as it has already been purchased.<br /><br />Also do you think using paypal is a good method to sell items online (accept payment). Is their any other methods I could use to accept payment?<br /><br />Thanks<!--content-->
for the small business, PayPal is great. Until you are doing about ?0 a day +, don't even look elsewhere.<br /><br />In terms of "locking a product once bought", this is basically stock keeping. What you need to do is, in your callback from PayPal (part of the payment process anyway), they will return various bits along with something you give them. So if you give them some form of encoded (NOT hashed) string with the product reference number in it, you can tell which product this payment is for.<br /><br />If your site is on a database, you can then simply setup a status switch (1 for on sale, 0 for out of stock type of thing). If you don't use a database, you are kinda stuffed.<!--content-->
for the small business, PayPal is great. Until you are doing about ?0 a day +, don't even look elsewhere.<br /><br />In terms of "locking a product once bought", this is basically stock keeping. What you need to do is, in your callback from PayPal (part of the payment process anyway), they will return various bits along with something you give them. So if you give them some form of encoded (NOT hashed) string with the product reference number in it, you can tell which product this payment is for.<br /><br />If your site is on a database, you can then simply setup a status switch (1 for on sale, 0 for out of stock type of thing). If you don't use a database, you are kinda stuffed.<!--content-->