I've never worked with pay pal before and I was going to open an online store. Being the php freak that I am, I coded my own shopping cart so that isn't really an issue. I was just wondering how my website would know when somebody has payed or not? Can I have paypal load a php page or is it only through email? Pretty much any information about pay pal would be nice.
Thanks!

Well paypal is very good for online stores as it makes the buy now buttons and therefore when you check it out instead of doing it all on your server it redirects your customers to paypal secure page where they enter their information which is kept confidential. It is very secure and much better in my opinion.

About the email thing its more like a bank account where you have money mostly used by people for online transactions. It keeps the money and you can log into paypal through paypal created page and enter the information there when buying something. Its very easy once you sign up you get the hang of it.

If i'm not mistaken, PayPal gives you the option to send the user back to your site at a specified URL after a payment. If you want, you can make a PHP page for whatever script you have in mind and have PayPal send the user there.

That wouldn't seem very secure. I was talking about a private page that paypal could load so that if they were to buy something it would change something on the database instead of having to do it manually. If it just redirected the customer, if somebody were to find out about this, they could just load this page after making a cart and get free stuff. Do other websites who use paypal just do everything manually?

Paypal is very secure for businesses. I haven't ever made a business paypal account, but I know if you do have one it gives you a specific link for each product you have. You put the link in your pages and stuff and when the user clicks on it, they are taken to paypal so they can securely pay for the product they just bought. When they have payed paypal will give you notification (not sure how, like I said, never had one) then you fulfill your end of the deal. So if anyone should be worried about being stolen from it is the buyer, not the seller; though, paypal offers a very nice theft protection service for free for anything under $2000 USD.

Hope this helps

Hey,

Well I have seen a good pro of Paypal. They give the detail of the member/client when they have bought a product so you can see the money they have spent and even more details which helps a lot.

Also if they think that someone is trying to cheat then they immediately put the money on hold till the case is closed. This seems like an inconvenience as the case can go on and on but you can be sure if the same cheat comes next time to your company.

Their email notifications are very helpful for they can give you a sort of history of the client and tells you whether the client had made a one time payment or was a subscription.

Thanks and hope you understand what I was rambling about

I don't think any of you understood at all what I was asking, I wasn't questioning the security of paypal or how it works or "Besides Email Notification, What Does PayPal Offer?" which isn't what the initial title of this thread was. I don't know who edited my post but you made it worse... Thanks!

Hey,

If you ask the question again clearly I think your problem would be solved, As for your topic title I think it was changed because your question was not clear enough so I think you should edit the first post and accordingly I will change the topic title. Ok?

Thanks

Aha I figured out how to do it. Paypal offers something called IPN which posts values to your website so the website can add the extra features that the buyer bought for his account, without the buyer having any way of knowing what these variables are. To turn this on, go to my account tab, then profile, then on the right click the link that says "Instant Payment Notification Preferences". I believe you need either a premium or a business account to have this option. Then enable it. There are pretty useful instructions found here.