Paypal add-to-cart

Hi- So I'm building a customer site to sell downloadables through his site, and he wants to use paypal. We need to build some basic account functionality so individuals buying the items create an account first, and we'll track which items were purchased. This means we have to get some reply from paypal when the transaction is done to note a completed transaction. Can I use your free tools to accomplish this? Do I need something else?

If you use eCart you can use Express Checkout and do the transaction directly from the web site without needing to wait for a reply from Paypal.

If you use the free toolkit paypal buttons, then the only solution is to use IPN, which would probably require a premier support ticket to help you build and configure since IPN can be difficult to debug and you have to pass extra information in the created form using a hidden field named "custom" to keep track of important identifying information about the purchase.

So architecturally, what makes the most sense to you? I have a list of dynamically populated products from a table. Each would have.. what? A button that would cache the product somehow and take the user to a page requiring login/create account function? Like I said, we need to keep track of completed purchases for each user's account.

You would use your MySQLi Server Behaviors to create a login page so that you can keep track of the user. Then you can use the "custom" hidden form element to store that information which will be passed back tot the IPN page by Paypal. Then store the purchase details on the IPN page.

I get that. Even before I have the user create an account or login though, I need to grab the product that the user wants to purchase. So I have a page currently populated with static Paypal buttons (http://www.theharmonyman.com/browse-music.php) which all add those products to the paypal cart function.

I imagine I would replace these buttons with my own buttons that somehow cache the product info (of some sort?) and take the user to a page to login/create account, and eventually add to paypal's cart.

Once the payment is done, I need to be returned to this site to set a bit in a Sales table for the user unique ID, and then send an email to them with links to the music they've purchased (PDF).

I really think you should use eCart. If we have to do a custom cart: "replace these buttons with my own buttons that cache product info"... that is exactly what eCart does.

Then you want to take all of the items in the cart and "eventually add to paypal's cart"... again handled by eCart

"Once the payment is done, I need to be returned to this site to set a bit in a Sales table for the user unique ID, and then send an email to them with links to the music they've purchased (PDF)."

Ecart has this built in too.... this is essentially everything ecart is designed to help you do. If we do this in premier support you will probably spend as much as you would purchasing eCart and doing it yourself and it would be a cleaner solution than what we would hack together using paypal standard buttons and IPN.