Help needed with subscription system

Hi,

I'm after some help with the concept of this. I'm inexperienced with eCart and need a guiding hand.

I'm setting up a website for a client. The site is a learning centre. I've already set up the admin section for each course and the page on which it is displayed.

I've set up the payment buttons which go through to the shopping cart and then the check out. It even goes to PayPal standards where I could buy the course if I so wished.

What I need your help with is the next stage. The "student" upon buying the course or courses (yes the client wants them to be able to buy several courses at once) then needs to go back to the site to find that the course(s) they have bought are now free of any restriction and they can just use them.

I used the checkout wizard to set up the cart.

From previous limited experience I know that they need to be returned (from PayPal) via an IPN? Is this something that eCart does or is it something that needs to be set up by hand? If the latter is true; how?

Any help from anyone would be most appreciated. I'm not after anybody doing this for me. Just some pointing in the right direction.

Many thanks.

The IPN page is not a page that the user will return to.

The IPN Page is a page that the paypal system will make a post to once the transaction is processed to let your site know if the transaction is successful or not.

eCart will not create this page, you will need to create the IPN page.

On the bindings panel, click the plus button and select eCart -> Checkout -> Checkout form response.

from the list of gateways select Paypal IPN Cart.

This will give you bindings to use for the information that paypal will send.

the IP page will need to update the orders table to set the status of the order based on the result sent in form paypal.

see the paypal site for more details on IPN:
ipn

Hi Jason,

Many thanks for the reply. It all makes sense to me so hopefully I will work it out.

I'll let you know what happens when I have a go.

Hi Jason.

Reading through several threads in this forum I think I've decided to use PayPal Express Checkout and thus avoiding an IPN page. But now I have further questions

The express option is found after choosing the website payments Pro method. Am I to assume then that to use express checkout you need a payment pro account or can it still be used with a standard account?

You can use a standard account, but you will need to get API access credential from paypal.

In the eCart checkout wizard, you will need to select to create pages for payments pro.

Payments pro is 2 services, Direct Payment and Express Checkout. After the pages are created, you can delete the checkout form from the checkout page and leave only the Express checkout button in place and delete the confirm.php page to remove the Direct Payment option

Thanks Jason.