Shopping cart or no shopping cart?

[Cornish Steve]

We need to allow users of our system to buy units of virtual currency (which is how our system works). There are only two options: buy 100 units or buy 1,000 units. Do we need basic shopping cart software to do this? (Our users are trusted users, so potential fraud is not a concern right now.)

In the near future, we'll need to allow users to exchange virtual currency units back to real money (exchange 100 units or exchange 1,000 units for a 'refund'). Are there ways to do this?

What would be the best and the least expensive approaches? (Thanks for your help on this.)

[RedEvo]

A Paypal/Google/Amazon buy now button would do it.

d

[bluecm]

Hi Steve(?),

Its totally possible to do this. Just a few quick questions.

Do you want to have users log in to buy credits and also will this need to integrate with some other system i.e. automatically assign the credits they buy to another system?

[Cornish Steve]

Users are registered with us in advance (the nature of the application) and login to use our system, so the buy option is within a protected SSL environment. They shouldn't need to log in again to buy credits. Our system does need to know which option they choose (100 credits or 1,000 credits) and add them to their account. I assume our developers would implement this.

[ken_uk]

Paypal will allow a developer to integrate the buy now or subscription buttons into a website, so that when the order is complete, paypal notifies your sites back-end of the verified transaction, and then your code can do whatever is needed (update credits etc)

Your developers will need to write the code to do it all though.... Not to mention test it thoroughly, and you will need to keep an eye on paypal to ensure if it is going to change the api/methods that you update your site to keep up (although instant payment notification seems to be fairly stable now)

Documentation for developers is available on paypal's own site, but its pretty poor quality for things like subscriptions etc, so expect to allow a bit time for the devs to get to grips with it if they are not familiar with it all.
Many of the free examples on the net are based on paypals own examples, and are not really suitable for use in a real system, as they dont really check everything they should.
Even if you dont think you need to be careful about fraud protection etc, you should design it in from the outset - if someone outside your community finds out its not secure, especially if you do refunds then you dont want a system that allows any loopholes to get free credits etc.


Other services (nochex etc) also have similar schemes, only tested the paypal way so far though, but looking into other methods.

[Cornish Steve]

This is great feedback. Thanks, Ken.