Hi everyone. I'm building a website for a friends (he's starting his own business). What he wants is, someone to visit his website, purchase something they like. When they pay through paypal, he wants the website to send them an e-mail with a password that is taken from a (SQL) database on the website. They will then be able to go to the website, enter the password and retrieve whatever they bought.

I'm nowhere near proficient in this stuff, so I was wondering if there is anyway to do this, and if so, would anyone be able to help me in providing or atleast pointing me in the right direction of retrieving the code.

I greatly appreciate any and all help. Thank you

Google Code Search is a good place to get started; so is PayPal's API documentation. I haven't used it, so don't know where to find it online, but that shouldn't be that difficult.

Are you using Microsoft - ASP and SQL Server - or LAMP - PHP and MySQL?

Hi,

I did something similar to this - the only difference is that I was writing to a database after payment was complete. Not a big difference. I used IPN (instant payment notification) with Paypal.

IPN basically verfies the transaction and then executes a file on your website (I'll refer to it as the IPN file) that you specify. Paypal has other options, but IPN is a good choice for your situation because the user will still get their email even if they close their browser and don't return to your friends website after payment. It also isn't dependent users internet connection.

For me, IPN executes a PHP file which contains all the MySQL queries to update the database. You would put your database read query and email code inside of your IPN file. PayPal will verify the payment transaction and then pass all variables to your IPN file where you are able to use them. If you need any custom variables passed you can do that too but you are limited to one custom variable. [TIP: If you need more you can just store all variables as one big string and then use the string tolkenizer in your IPN file to retrieve the values.]

Paypal also has some other things that you can use in combination with IPN but I don't know much about them.

I Hope that helps.

LPP that sounds almost exactly like what I wanted, thanks very much. I'll definitely have to look into that. Thank you so much for the tip. ForrestCroce, I'm using PHP and MySQL.