Order Insert before confirmed?

I am running Dreamweaver CS4 and eCart 5.0.1 on a Windows Vista machine using PHP and MySql. I have a question about the sequence of events during the checkout process. First, users click on the Add To Cart button by each product they want to purchase. Next they click on the View Cart button which takes them to the cart.php program. There, they click on the Checkout button which takes them to checkout.php. At this point they will be shown the shipping from and ship to information. When they click the Checkout button there, they go to confirm.php which immediately inserts records into the orders and orderdetail tables before displaying the Order Confirmation screen. Finally, on this screen they get to see how much the Grand Total including taxes and shipping is going to be. There are buttons to Modify Information and Check Out to pay. It seems to me that logically, you would want them to see how much the Grand Total is and decide that they are satisfied with the total and click the checkout button to pay before you would insert order records into the tables. If they change their minds after seeing how much the Grand Total is and abandon the cart then this would leave invalid order records in the tables. Does it seem like the insert should be done when the Check Out button is clicked to pay instead of before they get to see what the Grand Total is going to be?

when using a remote checkout method such as PayPal Payments Standard, the order information cannot be stored in the database when the user clicks the checkout button on the confirm because that checkout button must send the order information to the payment gateway.

When using PayPal Payments standard, you should have an order status column in your database that will be set to pending when the order is first inserted.

If you are using PayPal Standard, you can configure your paypal account to make an IPN (Instant Payment notification) post, this IPN post can be used to update the order status once the transaction is processed.

I really don't recommend using PayPal Standard because of the complexity of setting it up properly. another free alternative is to use PayPal Express Checkout.

With Express Checkout, the order information wont be stored in the database until the user clicks the Confirm order button on the confirm page.

Jason,
I will give PayPal Express Checkout a try as you suggest instead of the PayPal Payments Standard. What do I need to do to go from Standart to Express? Do I need to regenerate all of the eCart pages to start using the new method?
Thanks so much,
Jack

yes, you will need to delete the existing checkout pages, then rerun the checkout wizard to use Express checkout checkout.